Shelley Row has 29 years experience as a transportation engineer and spent five years as the Director of the US Department of Transportation’s ITS Joint Program Office.
Shelley Row, former Director of the US Department of Transportation’s ITS Joint Program Office, gives her views on the way forward for the industry.
We, as intelligent transportation system (ITS) proponents and engineers, tend to be overly fixated on benefit-cost data. We want decisions to be made on logical grounds for which benefit-cost calculations are optimal. While benefit-cost data is necessary, it is not always sufficient. We can learn from our history where we see three broad groups of ITS deployments. First are those technologies with clear and direct benefit to an agency’s operating costs or capital expenditures. This includes technologies such as toll collection and transit automatic vehicle location (AVL). This type of ITS deployment has seen strong implementation. From the most recentSecond are technologies and applications that provide direct benefit to travellers and includes services like 511 and travel times on message signs for freeways or transit properties. The strong use of websites, message signs and 511 for traveller information is evident in the 2010 deployment tracking survey (Figure 1). Even then there was a surprisingly strong usage of Twitter and other social media tools by public agencies. Social media is catching on and almost every week brings a new report of an agency using Twitter, Facebook or Flickr to share transportation information. Consumer apps driven by the innovative private sector have exploded.
The third group includes technologies and applications that collect data or optimise system performance for safety and mobility. This group of technologies is where concern typically exists about slow deployment. While these technologies have positive benefit-cost ratios, the cost savings cannot be directly monetised by an agency. For example, saving travel time is important to transportation agencies but those savings do not directly benefit an agency’s budget even though there is a clear societal good. Consequently, technologies like freeway and arterial management have been slower to deploy.
Nonetheless, there continues to be steady growth in transportation management centres and miles of instrumented freeways. In the latest report available, 54% of all US freeways in the top 75 metropolitan areas were under surveillance (see Figure 2), and there were 266 operational traffic management centres in the country. Even so frustration continues that, despite positive benefit-cost numbers, deployment hasn’t matched that of other ITS technologies.
Most of the frustration comes from people like myself: logical-minded engineers who are trained to believe that if facts and numbers support a decision, then it must be the right decision. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work that way. In my research on leadership decision-making, I found that leaders at top levels (particularly political leaders) depend on fact, analysis and gut instinct to make an ‘appropriate’ decision.
‘Appropriate’ in this sense means a decision that is technically sound and is supported by a range of stakeholders such as citizens, businesses and the politicians who represent them. This instinctual sense rolls together facts, figures, a sense of people and a sense of situational context. Furthermore, any investments must be easily understood and quickly valued by others. As one State DOT executive told me, “If I can’t explain it, I can’t sell it.”
How can we use this understanding to further ITS deployment for these particular technologies? I see three options, the first of which, long employed by public agencies, is to combine ITS technologies having intangible benefits with projects having tangible benefits such as roadway construction projects.
Another approach is to reduce the price point for this type of ITS investment. The processes used to select transportation investments by public agencies may not be perfect but, for the most part, investments are made where there is a perceived need. In the case of ITS deployment on freeway systems, not every section of freeway has the same need nor the same value for the investment. Certainly, progressive governmental managers had hard-fought battles to convince decision-makers to invest in ITS but I believe they fought for those locations where the need was greatest. If that’s true, it means that ITS has been deployed in areas where yesterday’s price point and yesterday’s need intersect. Change the price point and that changes where investment makes sense.
Today the technology has changed and with it the price/benefit balance point. Data from phones and cars create a rich environment of information and this technology is already changing the price/benefit balance point. Now there is an ability to capture data on roadways that would not otherwise have been feasible to instrument. Agencies are stepping up their use of probe data and, I believe, that trend is likely to continue across a broader swath of the transportation network.
Finally, the last option is to recognise that the ‘obvious’ choice isn’t always as obvious as we might think. Those of us who are analytically inclined expect an orderly, logical approach to making the right decision; but we need to take a broader view to set that decision-making in context. There are still leaders who don’t appreciate the role technology can play in transportation. The emphasis on performance measures and the entry into the workforce of those born in the digital age will increasingly aid the use of technology in transportation.
Still, we analytical types would benefit from looking beyond the numbers to put ourselves in the shoes of the public, politicians or a DOT executive. What needs do they perceive that transportation technology can fill? What are their views about transportation investments? How do they feel about transportation’s value to the customer? Is now a good time to push technology?
As transportation technologists, our challenge is accepting that to the public, public servants and politicians, non-logical issues are just as persuasive (and perhaps even more so) as benefit-cost analysis. The ITS industry has grown up and it’s time to find our place in the bigger transportation context; and if we can walk in the shoes of the decision-makers we may see new opportunities.
Today it is no longer helpful to lament the general lack of ITS deployment - indeed ITS deployment has gone well for many technologies and it is moving quickly for consumer-driven applications. So let’s be specific about the areas where there is truly a lag. For those technologies we may benefit from taking a broader view that considers the full context and resonates with the decision-makers who have to make the tough investment calls. If benefit-cost analyses alone were going to sell these projects, it would have done so long ago - so maybe we’re just missing the point.
