Remarks by Deputy Secretary Downey at the Hewlett Packard Automotive Technology Seminar |
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Mortimer Downey, United States Deputy Secretary of Transportation
March 31, 1998
REMARKS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY
DEPUTY SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION MORTIMER DOWNEY
HEWLETT PACKARD AUTOMOTIVE TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR
LIVONIA, MICHIGAN
MARCH 31, 1998
Good morning. Thank you, Paul, for that introduction, for your vision of the future, and for hosting what promises to be a very informative and useful conference. I’m glad to have this opportunity to join you this morning to talk about the Department of Transportation’s Intelligent Vehicle Initiative. Before I do, I’d like to make an announcement.
As we approach the 21st century, what we most need to prepare for the transportation challenges we face are people, or, to be more specific, well-educated, well-trained people who can help to develop and deploy advanced transportation systems. And to have such a workforce, we need schools which can prepare the next generation of transportation professionals.
Our chief DOT initiative to support the nation’s educational community is our University Transportation Centers program. It advances American technology through academic research centers, and at the same time it trains the scientists and engineers we need.
One of the nation’s outstanding programs, and an outstanding participant in our UTC program, has been the Great Lakes Center for Truck and Transit Research. Headquartered at the University of Michigan, this consortium includes Central State, Eastern Michigan, Michigan State, Northwestern, Wayne State, and Michigan Technological University.
We’re proud to have been this center’s partner for the past decade, and we’re looking forward to continuing our partnership through a $500,000 grant which I’m going to award today. This grant, the first installment of our support for the 1998-99 academic year, will support the center’s educational programs.
The balance will come after reauthorization of ISTEA, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, which covers our highway and transit programs. ISTEA expired last October, and was extended by Congress only temporarily, which is why this is just the first installment. We hope Congress will act quickly to pass a long-term reauthorization bill before this extension lapses at the end of next month. That will enable us to get the Great Lakes Center and our other UTCs their full year’s funding.
Now, I’d like to ask Professor Robert Carr of the University of Michigan, the Great Lakes Center’s Associate Director for Academic Programs, to join me and our host Paul Chermak so I can present this grant to him on behalf of Secretary Rodney Slater and the Department of Transportation...I want to congratulate the Great Lakes Center’s member schools for their outstanding work over the years. We look forward to more outstanding alumni of their programs.
The center’s programs are important to creating the new technologies we need for the 21st century, technologies which will help us to meet the challenges we face, everything from congestion to pollution to energy waste.
The class of advanced technologies known as intelligent transportation systems is particularly important for us and our interest in developing the full potential of the transportation systems to sustain our mobility.
DOT been in the middle of this development. We’ve contributed seed money for deployment, supported research, aided in the setting of technical standards and the creation of an architecture, and provided training and technical assistance to states and localities.
The results we’ve seen justify the investment we’ve made, and call for more: after a billion dollars of investment, six years of research, and scores of operational tests, ITS’s potential should be clear to even the most skeptical observer.
In the same way that improved air traffic systems have been the key factor in doubling the number of planes that our aviation system can handle, and have laid the groundwork for advanced air traffic management, so improved surface transportation management systems can help us to make better use of our existing roads and transit lines.
In metropolitan areas, we know that ITS can cut by 35 percent the cost of providing the highway capacity we need over the next decade, and it’s also clear that, in an era of limited resources, we can’t pass up that kind of savings.
ITS also can save taxpayers money directly through improved government operations, another imperative in today’s environment of budget constraints at all levels. For example, transit agencies can achieve substantial savings using such ITS technologies as advanced fleet management systems and electronic fare payment. Baltimore already has increased transit productivity 23 percent by using a fleet management system.
States can also benefit through operating budget savings when they invest in the various commercial vehicle applications of ITS: electronic clearances could save up to $160,000 annually per weigh station, and electronic tolls can cut collection costs by 90 percent.
ITS’s benefits aren’t limited to metropolitan areas. Rural areas can benefit from many ITS-based services: Mayday response for faster emergency service on isolated roads, rural transit dispatching, using global positioning satellite systems, accurate information on weather and road conditions, or tourist information services.
Incidentally, today Vice President Gore announced that two new civilian signals will be provided by GPS. These signals, made possible by a partnership between the Defense and Transportation departments, will expand the use of GPS in everything from aviation to boating to surface transportation applications such as ITS. So the capacity and the opportunities will be there.
Commercial vehicle operators also can benefit from such ongoing initiatives as electronic transponders which provide nonstop clearance for trucks, automatically identifying, classifying, and weighing them and checking their permits and tax status, saving as much as a half-hour per truck.
ITS also can provide the automatic vehicle and freight tracking and other GPS-based services we need to cut delays in shipping and make "just-in-time" deliveries feasible for more and more businesses, cutting costs and improving service.
The most important reason for ITS initiatives, and the Department of Transportation’s highest priority, is safety. Highway crashes alone kill more than 40,000 Americans each year and injure five million. They cost our economy $150 billion annually in medical costs, property damage, and lost productivity. Those numbers could worsen as travel continues to increase.
Yesterday, I spoke to the Lifesavers conference in Cleveland, which each year brings together hundreds of dedicated safety professionals and volunteers from across the country. They’re working every day to combat the causes of highway crashes, such as drunk and drugged driving, and to better protect travelers through such strategies as increased seat belt use.
I like to say that there’s no silver bullet for any of the transportation problems we face, but there is silver buckshot. So, even as we implement the safety strategies that are available today, we need to keep searching for new solutions.
One very clear solution is intelligent transportation systems. That’s because driver error is a primary cause of about 90 percent of all highway crashes. If we can create new technologies to avert those errors, then we can prevent crashes in the first place.
That’s why we’re launching the Intelligent Vehicle Initiative, the IVI, to help protect travelers. We believe that new technologies can enhance driver performance, helping motorists to avoid hazards and crashes, and I’d like to describe what we’re doing.
This initiative already has federal support at the highest levels: it’s one of 10 multi-modal, multi-agency transportation research programs moving forward under the auspices of the National Science and Technology Council. Through cooperative programs and public-private partnerships, we want to introduce both vehicle-based and vehicle-infrastructure-based driver assistance safety systems.
We see the prospect of real breakthroughs: sensing in the blind spots for drivers of school buses and trucks; enhanced night vision; intelligent cruise controls that will maintain the distances between vehicles, and not just speed; and run-off-the-road warnings
Nationwide implementation of just three of these systems, rear-end crash avoidance, road departure collision avoidance, and lane-change/merge crash avoidance, could prevent one out of six of today’s crashes, a million annually. In fact, rear-end collision avoidance systems by themselves could prevent more than three-quarters of a million crashes each year.
The Intelligent Vehicle Initiative represents a fundamental shift in focus from protecting drivers in crashes and emphasizing driver behavior to encompass the prevention of crashes in the first place. The IVI will focus on human factors, to maximize safety and minimize the risk of driver distraction, always a concern in an age with everything from cellular phones to in-car fax machines.
The IVI will be comprehensive, covering all types of vehicles. And the IVI will be collaborative, bringing together diverse stakeholders to ensure that these systems are technologically, socially, institutionally, and economically viable.
As a first step, we want to accelerate the testing of these systems to demonstrate that intelligent vehicles can improve driver safety. We want to develop and validate performance specifications and design guidelines that can be commonly used within a decade.
We want to reach agreement on the basic functional requirements of driver assistance features, and target those features as the basis for industry investment in working prototypes. We want to create functional prototypes to enable us to evaluate intelligent vehicles as a complete market package. And we want to accurately estimate, through early demonstrations and field tests, these vehicles’ benefits and costs in order to justify the investment necessary for extensive production.
The technologies we’re looking at range from relatively simple in-vehicle travel and hazard information systems to advanced collision warning, control intervention, control assistance, and cooperative infrastructure networks. We see these falling into three levels of increasing capabilities and degrees of technical integration. First, warnings and information to drivers. Second, limited vehicle control and intervention. And third, advanced vehicle control and intervention.
We have some ambitious expectations. Our goal is to have intelligent cruise control on the street within two years; crash avoidance systems within five to seven years; and full integration of vehicles and the road infrastructure within 10 to 20 years. Ultimately, we see these technologies as the basis of a new level of transportation safety, something which could become as common as center brake lights or seat belts.
We’ve gathered our research efforts across the Department of Transportation into a single, integrated effort, and we’re making a substantial investment, up to $50 million annually for the IVI alone. And this is only part of our commitment to intelligent transportation systems.
All told, we want to invest about $1.6 billion dollars in them over the next six years, much of it for research, and much to provide, through state and local governments and their private sector partners, the electronic infrastructure for systems which already are technically-feasible and cost-effective.
This is really only the tip of the iceberg: we’ve also proposed a series of proposed legislative changes that would give state and local decision makers enhanced flexibility to use existing federal-aid funds to deploy the basic ITS infrastructure. Every dollar in every major federal program would be usable for ITS facilities and services, giving states and localities an unprecedented range of funding options and dramatically increasing the pool of available capital.
The investment we propose is significant, but it’s frankly not enough by itself to make such systems a reality. We need the support of the academic community and the private sector if we’re going to continue making progress on both a national intelligent transportation infrastructure and a fully-integrated intelligent vehicle.
It’s time for us to develop the collaborative partnerships we need to prevent crashes before they happen. I’m here to tell you that we are completely committed to the Intelligent Vehicle Initiative, and to encourage you to explore cooperative arrangements with us. We would welcome your participation, because these technologies are genuinely of national concern, because of the value of coordinated research that generates synergies and economies of scale, and because your participation leverages public sector investment at all levels.
We look forward to your involvement, and your support, from the start. I also hope that you, as the leaders in the national technology community, will take up the challenge to make the most of the research and development that's being done throughout the country and around the world.
I want to commit to you that my door, and those of my colleagues at DOT, are always open to you and to your ideas. Let me close by wishing you the best of luck in your own efforts to build transportation systems for the new American century. Thank you.
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In his remarks the Deputy Secretary referred to Paul Chermak, marketing manager of Hewlett Packard’s Enterprise Account Organization; to Professor Robert Carr of the University of Michigan, the Great Lakes Center’s Associate Director for Academic Programs; and to U.S. Secretary of Transportation Rodney E. Slater.)
Source: U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT)