Stop thinking and act on cooperative infrastructures

OmniAir's Tim McGuckin looks at why metropolitan transportation networks might be the key to securing the long-term funding of cooperative infrastructure

Among those involved in the VII/IntelliDrive Programme (VIP), there is a realisation of the need for some new thinking. This stems from a sense of understandable impatience; we've been 'at it' for several years now and just want to see systems deployed.

The potential of VIP to positively affect transportation safety and mobility is fully recognised. It is also fully understood that the outlook for financing its deployment is bleak; the truth is that government will not be able to meet the cost. Hence we need some new ideas, and a new path, to VIP. If one is not created soon, a remarkable technology and an extraordinary opportunity to vastly improve not just transportation but our whole quality of life could be delayed more.

If VIP is to happen soon we must be creative and ask what is really needed to deliver its benefits. We need to ask who can bring ideas and solutions, rather than just criticism and further delay, to the table. Industry needs to acknowledge the current, fragmented state of ITS and the limitations of expensive, proprietary solutions. Government needs to be more realistic about the parochial interests and conventional models that are being sold and appreciate that to 'get there' it needs to set realistic, modest targets and move incrementally towards rapid deployments as soon as possible.

This article is not about the benefits of ITS investment, or a paean to 'smart' infrastructure. We have enough advocates for that. Instead, it drills down further to support a particular technology - 5.9GHz DSRC - and a particular way to increase the chance that it will be deployed by advancing the goals of two critical and interdependent interest groups. It takes a realistic look at where a reliable, long-term funding stream might come from and suggests a model which satisfies the revenue-led aims of the private sector and the safety-led aims of the public sector.

VII, safety and economic growth

The deployment idea proposed here is a marriage of two synergistic agents: economics and technology.

The first part of this concept arises from themes discussed in two books published by the 2086 Hudson Institute, 'Driving Questions' and 'Judges of the Secret Court.' Their premise is that the challenges America faces - be they healthcare, transportation, education, environmental protection, social security - need funding in order to be addressed adequately. The best (that is, the fairest, most sustainable and scalable) way to get that funding is to grow the economy. An obvious way to do that is to eliminate a current economic impediment - in fact, a critical market imperfection: congested transportation networks.

The idea is intentionally limited and targeted. The geographic focus is on metropolitan areas, these being the main contributors to GDP. The scheme emphasises enabling priced transportation networks that simultaneously manage demand, reduce congestion and create a sustainable flow of funding. The metropolitan areas would employ metropolitan mobility corporations composed of public, venture and regional business associations. This is done intentionally in order to balance out each of the organisations' parochial interests.

The partner to the first part of this concept was described previously in two 1846 ITS International articles which outlined the concept of VII Tactical Deployment (VTD).

The VTD model suggests that, rather than looking to roll out cooperative infrastructure nationwide and simultaneously, some form of 'viral' growth centred on major conurbations is more realistic. Growth would be viral in that like the bacteria in a Petri dish, the centres of deployment could then spread to meet and become universal. When wed to the Hudson premise, the plan is this: deploy 5.9GHz DSRC technology in metropolitan area transportation networks. These networks would then become part of a value chain. Metropolitan areas would retrofit themselves with DSRC systems to create intelligent, efficient, scalable transportation ecosystems featuring the base applications of pricing and value-added mobility services. The systems would be supported by a limited number of user groups and applications service providers who both contribute to the creation of value and see that it would be extracted to help their enterprises and build and maintain assets that underpin long-term economic growth.

The proposal above differs from the ideas put forward by the conventional ITS punditry in one key way: VIP Tactical Deployment addresses the funding challenge and does so in a sustainable, scalable and exponentially beneficial way.

"I want more than a buck"

In addition to enabling economic growth the scheme offers savings - which is timely, since the recession is forcing us all to think more about the effective use of assets. However, economic growth and efficiency is of greatest interest to primarily one stakeholder: the private sector.

For VIP Tactical Deployment to work, another equal partner is needed, in the form of the public sector transportation community. The latter has a different agenda and sometimes incongruous goals. For instance, it associates VIP first and foremost with safety - saving lives and reducing injuries. While doing so certainly has economic impacts, money is not its main driving criterion. The dilemma for public sector stakeholders is that due to institutional restrictions they have very little ability to innovatively and sustainably fund their agenda. Fortunately, safety and economic growth, and the VIP applications that enable each, are not mutually exclusive.

Interdependence - a saving virtue

While safety has a value it also has a cost, because systems cost money. Economic growth provides the financial wherewithal for deployment and can, like safety, be quantitatively measured. Together, improvements in both result in something greater than the constituent parts.

The approach taken to integrating the needs of the public and private sectors must incorporate each party's distinct skills, inspirations, motives, competencies, risk tolerances, reward policies, senses of urgency and goals. But is this possible? What if business embraces the idea and decides to partner with public interest groups? Does that mean it also adopts the latter's bureaucracy, inertia and paralysis? Does it continue with those impediments if they cannot contribute in a timely way to achieving results? On the other hand, will the public sector trust the private sector to leave room for the applications they value?

It is unlikely that either party will draw back because the approach offered not only mitigates the fundamental challenges faced by both but also obtains for them what they cannot get on their own.

The role of technology

Technically, 5.9GHz DSRC - proposed as the most logical hardware backbone of VIP - is nearly ready. How it will be deployed is very much still developing. Because it is based on open standards, like many consumer electronics offerings, this should encourage innovation.

Application developers will create new services; value will be created; value will be extracted and applied. Exactly how so depends on the type of value one seeks (safety or economy). But the 'spending' of this value would be the domain of those whose core competency is best suited to direct it.

Speaking of value, VIP is similar to consumer technologies in other ways. Suppliers are increasingly dealing in commodity technologies, a dynamic which leads to falling prices - not a welcome thing. Now, value increasingly comes not from selling those fairly standardised devices but from selling services. The VIP deployment model can advance this trend by increasing the value of the device to the owner.

 Stimulus - VIP's potential

The 239 Information Technology and Innovation Foundation released a study in January 2009 about the impacts of investment in three fields of technology: computerised medical records, smarter electrical grids and expanded high-speed Internet access in rural and under-served communities.

The $30billion spent would generate about 900,000 jobs in the first year.

What can we expect from VIP investment? VIP has the potential to give metropolitan areas not just employment but a lasting 'info-structure' foundation for more business innovation and efficiency. It will help create new services, some we can't yet even envisage. VIP deployments will provide an immediate stimulatory effect, but also a platform for productivity and long-term economic growth.

What's more 'stimulating' is that VIP investments are not only different from traditional infrastructure projects (concrete, asphalt and steel) but also other ITS projects. With respect to the first, how much investment in traditional infrastructure can be carried out in a short timeframe, or, given the relative inelasticity of the construction sector, carried out efficiently? VIP offers nearer-term impacts because there is no need to get involved in the land use and planning aspects of building new facilities. As well as the relative elasticity of IT, there is also the labour/material ratio - the proportion of a dollar spent on human resources when investing in VIP is higher than traditional infrastructure, where a greater percentage is allocated to materials.

Open standards, assured by 808 OmniAir's DSRC certification programme, mean that the devices deployed will be integrated into interoperable systems. This is a significant departure. Historically, the industry has very much been an amalgam of discrete communications systems built on different, often proprietary platforms. From development, innovation, economy of scale, customer and, ultimately, cost, perspectives this is severely limiting. Advances are constrained. Only those with tremendous resources innovate. Think of it: there's a good reason why 400 million devices were shipped in 2008 with WiFi chipsets.

A recipe for deployment

First, in one, major respect, we need to stop thinking and begin acting.

The first decision is to choose the technology, this being the standards-based 5.9GHz DSRC technology.

Doing so takes us one step closer to commoditising the hardware, which removes a major cost and impediment to innovation and invention. It in turn enables a technically narrow but highly capable, scalable, open platform from which anyone can develop data-out/info-in, value-add/value-extract applications.

Second, we focus our resources at a reasonable geographic scale - metropolitan areas - because their footprint is concentrated and they offer disproportionate economic contributions.

VIP investments will simply have much greater impact there.

Third, we may begin with electronic payment system applications. Not only do such systems quickly sustain themselves, like a toll road, they can be used to combat congestion through variable pricing strategies. The regional (it has to be metro-inclusive) pricing policy allows a steady income, which reduces risk and permits the partnership to maintain and expand the network, confident that the necessary funds will be there. The safety group ensures that the partnership reserves a portion of funds for the expansion of VIP safety applications because a major constraint on economic growth is not only capacity constraints but unsafe roads (there is also a moral imperative to do so). All partners feel confident that they can peel off and apply the value where it is important to them. The cycle is repeated.

To succeed, we need partners who see the importance of being able to extract both kinds of value. To reiterate: money and safety are mutually dependent objectives that VIP - the backbone of which is 5.9GHz DSRC - can serve.

The opportunity we have today - a new administration, a tough economic outlook, an interest in smart infrastructure investment - makes the transportation community uniquely susceptible to the persuasiveness of this idea. Moreover, there are certain moments in time when significant change is possible. It is not a certainty, but it is more likely. And while it is very difficult for any single person or interest group to actually set in motion that kind of momentum for change, when the urgency is there, which it is today, a combining of interest groups can not only help guide it, but also realise it.