Smart cars and smart highways: safety, economic benefits, and traffic improvements

Various smart vehicle and smart highway technologies and systems offer tremendous potential for improving road and vehicular safety. Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems (IVHS) have already been developed in the United States and Japan, also called Road Transport Informatics (RTI) in Europe (Collier and Weiland, 1994, p. 27). Smart highways are also referred to as Automated Vehicle Highway Systems (AVHS) or Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The lack of global consensus on what to call smart driving and smart highways reflects the burgeoning nature and broad gamut of technologies that need to be further developed and integrated into standardized systems. The most important of the IVHS systems involve both vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) technologies. Both V2V and V2I technologies capitalize on software and hardware systems that have already been integrated into many newer automobiles, such as GPS and WiFi. Some systems also require Dedicated Short Range Communication (DRSC), which is a WiFi system with dedicated bandwidth for vehicle use (Gandhi, Singh, Mukherjee, and Chandak, 2014, p. 262). Because DRSC allows integration between onboard equipment and roadside equipment, it is currently “the only available technology which provide the latency, precision and consistency needed for active safety,” (Gandhi, Singh, Mukherjee, and Chandak, 2014, p. 262). However, new smart vehicle and smart highway technologies are continually evolving to improve road safety, easing traffic delays, and reducing pollution.

One of the most promising new innovations in ITS is Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC), which “has a remarkable impact on traffic management and road safety by instantly using vehicular resources, such as computing, storage and internet for decision making,” (Whaiduzzaman, Sookhak, Gani & Buyya 2014, p. 325). Not only is VCC technologically feasible, it is also “economically viable,” easy to integrate into current highway systems and vehicles (Whaiduzzaman, Sookhak, Gani & Buyya, 2014, p. 325). For decades, advanced traffic management systems (ATMS), advanced traveler information systems (ATIS), commercial vehicle operations (CVO), and advanced vehicle control systems (AVCS) have already been implemented to help manage traffic on major highways around the world. Many of these systems have been used mainly for reducing congestion, with secondary benefits of improving road safety. More recent technological innovations are directly designed to improve road safety too. Integrating vehicle radars, cameras, and sensors in smart cars or self-driving vehicles within a V2I infrastructure will help optimize road safety and improve highway conditions overall.

Road safety is one of the critical concerns driving innovation, research, and development into IVHS. According to Hubaux, Capkin & Luo (2014), 1.7 million injuries and 40,000 deaths per year are attributable to traffic incidents in the United States, with approximately the same numbers in Europe. The costs of vehicular accidents is also alarming, at roughly US$1 trillion, nearly 3 percent of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) (Hubaux, Capkin & Luo, 2014). In addition to promoting safety and reducing the costs associated with accidents, smart technologies can also cut down costs associated with road and traffic management, infrastructure, urban planning, and development. Building new highways is not always feasible or cost-effective. To account for urban growth around the world, smart technologies enable efficient traffic management that can supplant the need for building new roads, making IVHS ideal for promoting safety, environmental sustainability, and cost savings too (Collier and Weiland, 1994). Traffic congestion also leads to loss of worker productivity and wasted fuel, both of which are readily alleviated when using IVHS (Jurgen, 1991).

Vehicles have sensor-driven data like GPS, 360-degree positional awareness, and risk calculation. Not only can vehicles with onboard smart technologies accomplish important safety mechanisms like automatic braking and cooperative adaptive cruise control, the information is also available in the cloud-based infrastructure, communicated to other enabled vehicles on the road. Vehicles communicate with each other, as well as with the overall transportation grid. Detection of severe or changing weather conditions, changing ambient lighting, and other methods of improving safety and increasing driver awareness are integrated into IVHS.

The main obstacle to rapid penetration of IVHS is that only a small number of new vehicles are equipped with the technologies needed for V2I. Retrofitting older vehicles may be necessary for all drivers to be on board with the system. In the United States, some regulators “are proposing making mandatory V2V technology in new vehicles,” but doing so seems unrealistic (Hall, 2017). Other potential drawbacks or resistance to using IVHS technologies include privacy concerns, security, and liability. Privacy is a core concern: as personal details about each driver are available and subject to abuse or data mishandling. Legal and liability concerns weigh heavily on policymakers, as smart technologies essentially shift responsibility—and therefore legal liability—away from the driver and to the technology manufacturer or cloud system operator. Jurgen (1991) notes that it is important to differentiate between driver information systems in smart cars and fully automated driverless cars when determining liability. If manufacturers are willing to assume liability for their fully automated systems, it could have tremendous implications for the entire cost structure of auto insurance. The highway systems manufacturers may also need to assume some liability for systems failures. Another problem with implementing smart cars and smart highways is whether to upgrade the infrastructure first and allow vehicle manufacturers to follow suit, or to pursue the reverse strategy whereby automobile manufacturers drive technological advancements.

Regarding privacy, data security, and surveillance concerns, Hubaux, Capkun and Luo (2014) note that with smart technologies, all vehicles are effectively tracked at all times via the use of electronic license plates (p. 51). Resistance to constant third party monitoring also impedes rapid implementation of smart cars and smart highways. The same technologies used to save lives can become a “Big Brother” scenario (Hubaux, Capkun and Luo, 2014). Which companies or government agencies have access to or own the data is a core issue. Drivers may want assurances that their movements are not being tracked for purposes other than maintaining road safety. Concerns about privacy are being quickly overridden by the benefits of IVHS such as tremendous cost savings, improved road safety, reduced travel times, and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. For these reasons, “governments are promoting these ideas as a way of keeping their nations competitive in the world market,” (Collier and Weiland, 1994, p 28). Pilot projects for fully smart car roadways have been implemented in Europe and Japan, like the CityMobil project (Dokic, Muller and Meyer, 2015). Smart vehicles can and already are being readily integrated into existing public transportation networks too (Jurgen, 1991).

Methods of improving the safety of IVHS overall include ensuring GPS systems are tamper-proof, using on-road infrastructure for location verification, and using temperature-responsive and light-responsive paint on the roads. Smart cars will have improved onboard technologies including systems that prevent bad lane changes and adjust speed to account for changes in road or traffic conditions. Another onboard technology being developed to improve smart car safety is visible light communications (VLC). VLC fulfills “several key safety applications, creating smart automotive lighting that combines the functions of illumination and signaling, communications, and positioning,” (Yu, Shih, and Tsai, 2013, p. 50). Useful for both signaling and receiving signals, VLC is also used for illumination. According to Yu, Shih and Tsai (2013), VLC offers additional benefits over radio frequency communications in that they cost less, are more scalable and easier to position, less vulnerable to tampering or attack, and accomplish greater safety goals in terms of being able to detect weather and lighting. Moreover, VLC can be used for collision warning and avoidance, lane change assistance or warning, and for cooperative adaptive cruise control (Yu, Shih, and Tsai, 2013). VLC is particularly helpful in making motorcycles more visible on the roads, and reducing the problems associated with differential driving patterns.

Fully smart systems in which the cars are driverless will be challenging but not unfeasible to implement. Since the 1990s, universities in the United States have been testing new systems, as with the Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH) program in California (Collier and Weiland, 1994). Smart Corridor and Pathfinder are similar American pilot projects for driverless cars and connected freeways. Sometimes referred to as platooning systems, driverless car lanes could be phased into existing highway systems or eventually replace drivers altogether, particularly as the systems become more feasible. Safeguards need to be built in, including robust redundancy, to ensure passenger safety. With driverless car and integrated IVHS services, sensors on the roads, reference markers, and other externalities interface with the internal status of each automobile in a completely networked smart system.

Current fragmentation of the market is another challenge to implementing smart cars and freeways on a large scale. With so many different types of technologies, tools, and manufacturers, it could be difficult to imagine a seamlessly integrated network. Yet if individuals can access the Internet using multiple hardware and software configurations, then it is certainly possible that diversity concerns will be mitigated with communications protocols. The same lessons can be learned from cloud computing regarding data security, privacy, and anonymity, applied to smart vehicles and highway systems. As vehicles become better equipped with onboard systems like sensors, cameras, VLC, and bi-directional GPS coordination, it is certain that road conditions will improve. Cars will detect risks or dangers, and alert drivers, or adjust their own systems using smart technology and artificial intelligence modeling. The more smart cars on the market replacing “dumb” vehicles, the greater overall road safety will become. Added to the onboard safety devices, highway infrastructure tremendously improves the accuracy of position systems, detection methods, and alerts for both driverless and driven vehicles. The costs of implementing IVHS are offset by enormous savings in everything from lost labor hours and lower gas consumption to reduction in medical bills resulting from accidents. It is clear that smart technologies are going to be integrated into the roads of the future; the only questions now are how to optimize and standardize these systems, and how to create appropriate regulatory and legal frameworks for implementation.



References

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Whaiduzzaman, M., Sookhak, M., Gani, A. & Buyya, R. (2014). A survey on vehicular cloud computing. Journal of Network and Computer Applications 40, 325-344.
Yu, S., Shih, O. & Tsai, H. (2013). Smart automotive lighting for vehicle safety. IEEE Communications Magazine, Dec 2013.