By: Matthew Scholz
Puget Sound Business Journal
June 6, 2008
Link to Original Article
The rising cost of fuel and concern over our nation's oil dependence have spurred many drivers to shop for more fuel-efficient vehicles. Sales of hybrids in the U.S. rose 38 percent last year.
The issue also has brought together long-time opponents seeking to solve the challenge of massively reducing the approximately 3.4 trillion pounds of CO2 created by vehicles each year and the $78 billion per year traffic congestion costs America without further crippling our economy. It's all the more unfortunate that the current national strategy for dealing with congestion seems to focus on charging drivers more rather than making our infrastructure more efficient.
Some state and local jurisdictions have used technology to make roads more efficient. But there has only been minimal effort made by the federal government to encourage this nationally. That's a shame. Simple improvements such as re-timing the traffic lights could yield major benefits. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, poor signal timing accounts for 10 percent of all traffic delays. This is the low-hanging fruit that we should be picking first.
While not a panacea, technology offers immediate solutions. Department of Transportation studies, for example, show that deploying traffic light "signal optimization technologies" such as "adaptive signaling" and "traffic responsive signaling" reduces fuel consumption by 10 percent to 15 percent. With nearly 76 percent of vehicle-miles driven on urban streets, a 15 percent reduction in fuel translates to saving 19.3 billion gallons of fuel a year. With all due respect to the hybrid crowd, those real, immediate savings are substantially more than would be saved if we could replace every one of the 41.5 million SUVs on the road with a similar SUV hybrid. That's because the savings in gas is relatively modest between the two when compared with the fuel that can be saved by making all the cars on the road more efficient.
What's more, technology now allows us to adjust traffic light timing in real time to adapt to changing conditions, using vehicle detection hardware to count cars approaching an intersection. The hardware can cost up to $30,000 per intersection. While that may sound like a lot, we already spend far more on roads and new transit options.
All the technology in the world, however, won't mean a thing unless someone knows how to use it. Many systems currently deployed already support traffic responsive signaling, but the jurisdiction in charge often hasn't turned it on due to lack of funds for technicians and traffic managers to run it.
The conspicuous absence of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) in current funding proposals is truly perplexing when the benefits are so thoroughly documented. A DOT Web site dedicated to the costs and benefits of ITS deployments is full of case studies. A project in Syracuse, New York, found signal optimization cut travel time 34 percent, reduced vehicle stops 16 percent and lowered fuel consumption 13 percent.
There are more than 330,000 traffic signals in the U.S. in dozens of complicated intersecting jurisdictions that all bid for systems independently, and most of the systems don't communicate with each other. State and federal government need to force all of their vendors to support an open standard or regional coordination will be nearly impossible.
A strong government push to adopt this kind of technology is important. Billions of dollars are allocated to capital expenditures, but it is hard getting millions for operations and maintenance. For every dollar we spend on roads we only spend a penny on ITS, and many jurisdictions spend essentially nothing on maintenance tasks such as updating traffic signal timing. This is unconscionable when the benefit to cost ratio for signal timing projects is so high.
California's fuel-efficient traffic management system had a benefit-to-cost ratio of 17:1 between 1983 and 1993, when metrics such as the reduction in fuel consumption, total trip time, and congestion are taken into account. In Texas a similar system boasted a 62:1 ratio in 1992, and technology has come a long way since then. It's nearly impossible to argue with those numbers. But never underestimate the statehouse. Elsewhere, legislators seem content to have traffic lights with 25-year-old hardware gumming up vital corridors. Almost no one seems to notice.
A major problem is that most transportation agencies don't really care how long it takes for individuals to get to work or how much fuel they waste getting there. But while government may not care much about efficiency, corporations usually do. Companies with private fleets of vehicles are rapidly deploying software that helps save hundreds of dollars in fuel per vehicle each month by optimizing the order of the stops the vehicle makes and highlighting unnecessary ones.
To help the government follow suit, we must establish different metrics for transportation. Currently they mostly focus on safety, accidents and fatalities. In a saner universe, statehouses would direct transportation agencies to consider wasted fuel, trip time, and overall traffic flow as well.
Today it is still very difficult for transportation authorities to get money for operations and maintenance because most money they get is earmarked for capital expenditures such as new roads. This is especially perplexing given that legislators will approve hundreds of millions of dollars to build an HOV lane but then not bother to have the signals timed properly from the highway to the park-and-ride. The effect is that the time gained and money spent on the highway is wasted as soon as they leave it.
Alternative sources of energy and substantially more efficient vehicles are desirable but a long way off. Some closer technologies like plug-in electric hybrids promise to be truly revolutionary, but even the best of these still have major technical and economic hurdles to overcome. While we wait, we should do what we can.
We can fix the lights today, and we should. It's relatively inexpensive and the challenges to doing so are mostly political. America has changed the world with software. It's time we leveraged software to save it.
Matthew Scholz is the CEO of Point B Telematics, which helps companies manage fleets of vehicles, and is the Director of Information Services at Discovery Institute.
