Discussion of how advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) and eventually self-driving cars (SDC) will improve the not-so-perfect history of safety over the past century with humans driving vehicles themselves

1. ™
TheintelligentchoiceforITS
INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS AND ADVANCED TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT
THEAUTONOMOUSISSUE
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
Maintaining the status quo is not
an option, says David E Pickeral
HTenyearsofThinkingHighways
10
OHIO TRC • SMART CITIES • A HISTORY OF ITS • TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT • FUTURE TRANSPORTATION
thinkinghighways.com
Volume 11 Number 4
NORTHAMERICA
EDITION
PUBLIC BROADCASTING SERVICE
How to manage fleets
of self-driving vehicles
INDUSTRIAL LIGHT AND MAGIC
Lifting the curtain on the
mystery of AVs

2. www.thinkinghighways.com2
CONTENTS
COVER FEATURE:
AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES
4 Doing nothing is not an option - the
shift towards autonomous vehicles
has to be handled expertly, says David
Pickeral
8 Mike McGurrin reveals the“magic”
behind self-driving cars
16 Bern Grush and John Niles imagine a
future where our roads are awash with
fleets of autonomous public transit
vehicles
STATE FOCUS: OHIO
26 Kevin Borras and Matt Curry report
from Ohio’s Transportation Research
Center where CEO Mark-Tami Hotta is
gearing up for the future
TECHNOLOGY
30 Congestion, prepare yourself to take
a hit
32 CES 2017 heralded a new era for
in-vehicle mapping
ITS
36 Mike McGurrin, Carolina Burnier and
Greg Hatcher look back at an eventful
last decade for the ITS sector
SMART CITIES
40 Bob McQueen answers the all-
important question: what exactly is a
smart city?
TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT
47 A short history of traffic management
techniques, by Alistair Gollop
FUTURE TRANSPORTATION
52 Amid the chaos, Eric T Hill has spotted
an opportunity
SMART CORRIDORS
56 Gordon Feller looks at Bolivia’s
ambitious Santa Cruz Road Corridor
Connector Project
COLUMNS
1 Kevin Borras wonders why
autonomous vehicles are seen to be
competing with electric cars
58 Mark D Johnson
60 Shelley Row
61 Richard Bishop
62 Bob McQueen
SERVICES
64 Advertisers’Index
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52
16
26
40
47
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3. www.thinkinghighways.com4
OPINION
I
have made coffee exactly the same way
since I was at university 30 years ago and
have used the same drip coffee maker
andhandgrinderIboughtattheLongBeach
Navy exchange store in 1989. I fresh grind
whole Canadian roasted beans from Tim
Horton’s for each pot and brew with filtered
water and an unbleached paper filter for a
perfect cup each and every time, no packets,
pods or canisters needed. Similarly I have no
needforaroboticcanine;asvirtuallyanydog
or other pet owner in the world will attest,
the tasks of feeding, grooming, walking and
caringforhimorher(not“it”)isbothalabour
of love and integral and inseparable to the
activity of having a live animal companion
in the first place. Likewise, any number of
things including but not limited to Tillam-
ook cheese, Crater Lake, Powell’s Books and
the word ‘Clackamas’ are not wanting for
any improvements.
Such cannot be said for the millennia-
old experience of driving. Once a slow,
dangerous, expensive, uncomfortable and
inhumane mode of travel the process was
improved at the end of the 19th century by
introducing machinery to do the task much
more efficiently and in the absence of pain,
suffering or any other feelings (stressing the
comment above about animals vs robots).
However, that improvement came and con-
tinues to come at a tremendous cost.
Inevitably the often cherished experience
driving as many of us have known it (remem-
ber the ‘Fahrvergnügen’ commercials from
25 years ago?) will – indeed must – steadily,
incrementally become obsolete. In so doing
will be replaced by a much safer, sustainable
and accessible standard of mobility benefit-
ting the disabled, elderly, economically dis-
advantaged – not to mention pedestrians,
cyclistsand,essentially,everyone.Butaswith
every disruption in transportation history,
the change will by necessity be incremental
and there are imminent potential hazards in
going about things the wrong way and risk-
ing expensive “do overs” or still worse the
loss of investor, public and regulatory confi-
dence not necessarily in that order.
RUNNING(OVER)THENUMBERS
From the Model T, to the Trabant 601 to,
still, the vast majority the brand new vehi-
cles sold through dealerships (or otherwise)
around the world yesterday afternoon
vehicles have had one thing in common
through their inability to compensate for
hazards encountered enroute. As of 2015
the World Health Organization reported
that reliably motor vehicles were now kill-
ing one and a quarter million people each
year on Earth – this inclusive of those driv-
ing, riding in or caught in the path of them.
There are many things that will always be just fine as they are.
Human beings driving vehicles is not one of them, but the shift
to autonomy must be carefully managed, insists David Pickeral
Room for
improvement

4. www.thinkinghighways.com 5
AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES
Moreover,owingironicallytotheadvance-
ment and proliferation of other technol-
ogy, we as a species are for all intents and
purposes getting worse at driving. The US
Department of Transportation (USDOT)
National Highway Traffic Safety Administra-
tion (NHTSA) in October 2016 announced a
dramatic 10 per cent increase in fatalities for
thefirsthalfofthatyearoverthesameperiod
the previous year and the first US increase
relative to vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in 50
years–withdistracteddrivingcitedasoneof
the key causes.
Thedistractionfactor,asNHTSAhasrecog-
nized,ishardlylimitedtodrivers,withpedes-
trian use of mobile devices also contributing
to a growing trend of distracted walking.
On the day that I was writing this piece in
early February I actually had a particularly
harrowing near miss with a pedestrian on a
major arterial in a heavily urbanized suburb
of Washington DC. This one – apparently
using earphones – simply chose for what-
ever reason to pop out into the empty road
next to my moving car, it would seem almost
deliberately targeting my right side blind
spot shortly after I had just made a legal left
turn at a green light. I wasn’t even sure the
pedestrian noticed me at all until I saw them,
by then receding in my rearview mirror.
These figures of mass carnage, as have
been the ones that preceded them for gen-
erations, are eminently tragic – but now,
imminently preventable through Advanced
Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). As many
reading these words likely already know,
essentially ADAS is technology that is able to
sense, detect, even predict to address a haz-
ard and either warn the driver or intervene
directly to prevent an accident. The main
premise behind ADAS is that it is not subject
todistractionorfatigue,andhastheabilityto
identify hazards that no human driver could
suchasapedestrianmovingbehindaparked
vehicle and about to step into the street.
AsdefinedrecentlybytheSocietyofAuto-
motive Engineers (SAE) there are now six
ADASLevelswithzero(0)beinga‘traditional’
vehicle solely monitored and controlled by
a human driver while Level 5 represents a
fully self-driving car. Levels 1-5 thereby are
achieved through an incrementally higher
combination of autonomy – the vehicle’s
independent internal ability to sense, ana-
lyze predict and react through its own sen-
sors much as a human driver would – and
connectivity with other vehicles, roadside
or back office systems (including the cloud)
and its overall environment to obtain both
comprehensiveandcloselytailoreddataand
information related to hazards, congestion,
weather, etc. The SAE standard is generally
acceptedassucceedingtheotherratingssys-
tems (e.g., that released in 2013 by NHTSA) as
the global standard.
Safety, as significant as it is, is by no means
the sole impetus for transformation given
the exponentially increasing potential to
monetizedatathroughtheInternetofThings
(IoT). A study released at the start of the year
by KPMG research, which polled nearly 1,000
executives with the world’s leading automo-
tive companies, found that 76 per cent say
one connected car generates more revenue
streams than 10 conventional cars. In fact,
expectations for data-driven revenue are so
great that 71 per cent say measuring OEM
marketsharebasedonunitssoldisoutdated.
Even as the OEMs discover value, investment
in new automotive technology startups con-
tinues to surge forward as well.
By any means accomplished this is emi-
nentlyachievableandindeedthereisalready
tremendous support for new technology
short of a fully driverless car across all demo-
graphics as shown by two major studies
earlier this year. While younger people not
surprisingly have a much higher degree of
confidence in a completely self-driving vehi-
cle per se as JD Power reports, Auto Con-
nected Car almost concurrently found that
drivers over 50 were very interested in ADAS
in their next vehicle purchase to offset the
physical infirmities of ageing (something I
appreciatemyself,havingturned50inMay,as
I pause here for a moment to clean my read-
ingglasses).Evenasyoungergenerationsnat-
urallygravitatetowardsthefullyautonomous
Thedistractionfactorisnotlimitedtojustdrivers
“Safetyisbynomeansthesole
impetusfortransformationgiven
theexponentiallyincreasing
potentialtomonetizedata
throughtheInternetofThings”

5. www.thinkinghighways.com6
OPINION
ride just as many of them eschew getting the
driver’s licences that were once a rite of pas-
sage, the older generations with their higher
purchasing power and political leverage are
clearly willing to put money (and votes) on
the table right now that neither industry (nor
government) dare ignore.
If there is anyone out there that still needs
convincingthatconnectedandautonomous
has gone mainstream, and that traditional
automakers actually “get it” in terms of the
inevitable progression of the industry away
from its product manufacturing legacy
moving towards MaaS and the evolving
multimodal mobility ecosystem note the
Ford commercial developed for the 51st US
Super Bowl. I am interested to see how other
OEMs worldwide might follow suit later dur-
ing 2017/18 around such key sporting events
as “March Madness,” the Stanley Cup, and
(especially) the FIFA World Cup.
TOOFAST,TOOFAR
However, even in our otherwise laudable
efforts to develop and deploy technology to
overcome human fallibility, the huge ongo-
ing effort to make in effect a quantum leap
to full autonomy has, unfortunately, taken
on something of an obsession. As I have
said again and again in numerous contexts
across both conventional and social media:
We as a species do not need self-driving car
technology that eliminates drivers nearly as
immediately as we need ADAS technology
thateliminatesaccidents.Thecurrentdebate
aroundSDCsisanalogoustowhatthoseofus
whohavespenttimeinmilitaryaviationrefer
to as “Target Fixation.” Simply put this means
being so focused on the ultimate objective
that one disregards all other priorities includ-
ing not getting shot down, hitting the side
of a mountain or other immovable object, or
even flying right into the target itself.
Many in the media, the public and even
in industry who should know better are suf-
fering from target fixation in the context of
SDCs these days, predicting thereby the
imminentreplacementofhumandriversand
the jobs associated with them. Rather than
cite current and near terms benefits from
ADAS technology including adaptive cruise
control, lane departure warning systems
and many other safety and convenience
enhancing features, there seems to be far
more focus on when people will be able to
summon a sharecar to their front door, send
their vehicle to park itself, (safely) sleep in the
driver’s seat and even speculation as to how
soon steering wheels will disappear.
Make no mistake, I am an unabashed
admirer of what Waymo (nee Google X),
nuTonomy and Tesla Motors among many
others are doing in paving the way for SDC
technology as well as the potential to more
fully develop the autonomous-connected-
electric-and-shared (ACES) business model
in conjunction with Solar City, espoused in
Elon Musk’s “Part Deux” over the summer.
Likewise I am glad to see both Hyperloop
One and Hyperloop Transportation Tech-
nologies Inc. competing to undertake a
long-overdue task of creating an entirely
new, disruptive and more sustainable trans-
portation mode for the 21st Century much
as stagecoaches, canals, railroads, aviation
and automobiles did in the 17th, 18th, 19th,
20th [and 20th] centuries, respectively.
These are critical ultimate goals – targets
– whereby the transportation and tech-
nology industries must set their sights to
ensure the further evolution of mobility.
Moreover some of the first SDC advances
might well come on not vehicles that con-
sumerscanbuy,shareorevenrideinasmuch
as those supporting the commercial logis-
tics enterprises that are in many ways even
morecriticaltotheeconomyatalllevelsthan
retail automotive. A new report, The State of
Freight II jointly developed by the American
Association of State Highway & Transporta-
tion Officials (AASHTO) and the American
Association of Port Authorities (AAPA) dis-
cusses needed public investment in freight
infrastructure. It could hardly be timelier as
the vision for public and private infrastruc-
ture investment under the 115th Congress
and the Trump Administration emerges.
Concurrent with that, there has been sig-
nificant though far less headline-grabbing
work related to connected and autonomous
trucks by OTTO Motors [owned and funded
by Uber] and Peloton Technology [backed
by DENSO and Intel Capital among others]
including a 120-mile autonomous beer run
by the former recently.
Finally, even focus on the technology itself
represents another form of target fixation,
where the best solution might not always
be in devices, vehicles and software so much
as more sustainable business models. For
instance, just because we have developed
the capacity to haul food, beverages and just
about anything else to and from the ends of
the earth doesn’t mean we should do so at
every opportunity. The efforts of local sourc-
ingactivitiestoprovidequalityinwhatweeat,
drink, wear, and use right in our communities
– everything from hand-knitted alpaca wool
sweatersto3D-printedmachineparts–willin
many ways as much ensure better use of our
logistics infrastructure and other resources
rightnowastheeventualabilitytosendaself-
drivingtruckhalfwayacrosscountry.
Inthemainstream:Ford’s2017SuperBowlcommercialput
self-drivingcarstotheforefrontoftheircustomerstrategy

6. www.thinkinghighways.com 7
AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES
So to the entrepreneurs and futurists,
please continue to dream big and aim high
– but for all of us, it is essential to maintain
situational awareness: truly assess the total
environment, identify all hazards (including
that approaching mountain) and opportu-
nities and make the most of what pre-SDC
technology and practices are already bring-
ing and will continue to offer long before
that first driverless vehicle pulls up to our
front door, or to the back of the nearest gro-
cerystore.Intheinterim,howevertheremust
be the ability to both validate and monetize
each of the incremental development steps
to achieve that goal. Whether ensuring
return on the investment of private fund-
ing, justifying government expenditure in
terms of public trust, or (ideally) doing both
through a public-private partnership (PPP/
P3) it is necessary to derive the maximum
value along the way.
BODYOFKNOWLEDGE
Whether ADAS or full SDC prevail, technol-
ogycanhelp,buttechnologyitselfisonlythe
beginning.Toaidingettingbeyondthatpro-
cesstherenowisalargeandincreasingbody
of knowledge publicly and freely available.
Indeed the latter half of 2016 and early 2017
in many ways saw North America play “catch
up” to other regions in the area of AV policy,
principally to Europe (i.e., the EU and the UK
as I begin to get used to referring to those as
separate entities) given their iMobility as well
as Vision Zero and other European initiatives
initiated during the past decade or so.
Indeed in all my 42 years in Washington,
I have never seen any Federal Government
agency knuckle down during a transition to
get so many loose ends tied up during the
just over two month transition from the 44th
to the 45th Presidential Administration on 20
January 2017. To a person the United States
Department of Transportation (USDOT) out-
going appointed leadership and Career staff
deserve appreciation for this critical effort.
Chief among these was the National High-
way Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
392-page Notice of Proposed Rulemaking
prospectively requiring vehicle-to-vehicle
(V2V) communication technology on all new
light-duty vehicles, enabling a multitude of
new crash-avoidance applications that, once
fully deployed, could prevent hundreds of
thousands of crashes every year by helping
vehicles communicate with each other. This
after NHTSA had released its seminal Federal
Automated Vehicles Policy guidance docu-
ment in September. Along with the German
Bundesrat declaration on full electric vehicle
conversion by 2030 in October it was argu-
ably the most significant administrative rule-
making action of the year at least in Western
countries related to making vehicles com-
prehensively smarter, safer and sustainable
by being Autonomous Connected, Electric &
Shared (ACES).
USDOT also formally joined the global
Vision Zero movement started by the
Trafikverket, Sweden’s Transport Administra-
tion in 1997 through its own towards Zero
Deaths initiative.
Additionally, just as the 96th Annual
National Academies of Science, Engineering
& Medicine – Transportation Research Board
andits14,000attendeeswerewindingdown
here, USDOT released its final Beyond Traffic
report. Difficult to even begin to summarize
here, it is objectively a most impressive com-
pendium of analysis, statistics, predictions
and use cases that will I hope be used as a
resource for some time to come in anticipat-
ing what the US and global transportation
ecosystem will evolve into across all modes.
Finally in literally the last hours of Anthony
Foxx’s landmark four-year tenure as Secretary
of Transportation came the Vehicle-to-Infra-
structure (V2I) Deployment Guidance and
resources on the USDOT Intelligent Transpor-
tation Systems Joint Program Office (ITS-JPO)
website. For any readers who are new to ITS,
Telematics, or Connected & Autonomous
Vehicles (CAV) – hint CAV is a convergence
of the first two much older ecosystems – as
well as those who are old hands, this resource
pagehassomethingeveryonecanuse.
Never to be outdone, in September the
Canadian Parliament commensurately stood
up its own impressive online resource library:
Automated and Connected Vehicles: Status of
the Technology and Key Policy Issues for Cana-
dian Governments/Véhicules autonomes et
connectés:étatd’avancementdelatechnologie
et principaux enjeux stratégiques pour les pou-
voirspublicsauCanada.
So, by almost any metric the tide, as many
of us have predicted in recent years, has
indeed risen. The floodgates for change are
open, and I predict that 2017 will long be
remembered as the era when the rubber
met the road (quite literally) and the years
of R&D, pilots and beta tests fully gave way
to both industry and government getting
CAV-SDC-ADAS-ACES to the front doors of
the public in ways that will save lives, real-
ize value for public expense, and also make
money along the way.
“Thelatterhalfof2016and
theearlyweeksof2017in
manywayssawNorthAmerica
playcatchuptootherregions
intheareaofAVpolicy”
Theformer
USSecretaryof
Transportation
AnthonyFoxx
David Pickeral, JD, has 29 years of
leadership experience in both public
and private sector related to realizing
the potential of information and
communications technology (ICT) to
enhance transportation effectiveness,
efficiency, accessibility, sustainability,
intermodality and safety from the
local to the global level. He is currently
focused on Autonomous Connected
Electric & Shared (ACES) vehicles, as
well as Smart City mobility initiatives.
www.linkedin.com/in/pickeral