The Intelligent Transportation Society of Virginia (ITSVA) held their 20^th Annual Conference last week (June 5-6) in Richmond, VA. Representatives from numerous organizations affiliated with the transportation industry attended the event. The conference focused on how the transportation industry is currently developing and will continue to improve with technology advances. The conference opened with a few remarks from Dean Gustafson who is the State Operations Engineer/ Division Administrator for the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT). VDOT is currently working on several new projects like the Connected Vehicle Program to create and maintain a world-class transportation system.

The first session covered MAP-21 (Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21^st century) and Performance Measures. Speakers from FHWA (Federal Highway Administration), VDOT, and ITERIS discussed their roles with MAP-21 and where they are headed. Rich Taylor with the FHWA (Federal Highway Administration) discussed MAP-21 and Performance Measures. The goal of MAP-21 is the transition of the highway program to a performance and outcome -based program. Rich discussed the goals for the Federal Highway Program which include safety, infrastructure improvement, congestion reduction, system reliability and freight movement. Next, Paul Szatkowski with VDOT discussed the VDOT dashboard which measures congestions, travel times, hours of delay, and incident duration. He talked about some of the root causes of congestion which include capacity, traffic incidents, work zones, and bad weather. Finally, Rob Hranac with ITERIS discussed implementing MAP-21 performance measures. He talked about the definitions of delay, threshold, and reliability and the data needed to measure delay and reliability.

Over lunch, Paul Feenstra with ITS America spoke about ITSA and VDOT’s role in moving ahead with vehicle-to-vehicle communications to ultimately reduce congestion and accidents. He discussed MAP-21 and the GROW America Act which will both help fund V2V and V2I research. Currently, their funding as been reduced from $100 million to $50 million and they hope to regain full funding with the GROW America Act.

The afternoon sessions included Active Traffic Management (ATM) and Managed Lanes and a Local Government Roundtable. The ATM and Managed Lanes session included speakers from VDOT, FHWA, Delcan/Parsons, and Fluor. It covered the lessons learned and operational considerations of planning, design, and implementation of ATM and Managed Lanes projects. The Local Government Roundtable included speakers from Arlington County, Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization (HRTPO), and the City of Richmond who discussed the local government’s coordination of issues and activities with surrounding jurisdictions, VDOT and other related agencies regarding development and deployment of local ITS.

The second day opened with two concurrent sessions, one of which was on Innovative Technology. This session included speakers from Blacksburg Transit, Luck Stone, FHWA, and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI).

Tim Witten with the Blacksburg Transit discussed the public transportation system in Blacksburg, VA and the cost and lifecycle of a bus. He emphasized on the fact that “transit is poorly understood” by many people. Following Tim, Travis Chewning with Luck Stone discussed the innovation and growth process of Luck Stone. Luck Stone has created a paperless service that has improved their delivery efficiency. Next, Neil Spiller, with the FHWA discussed the ICM (Integrated Corridor Management) program and the role it plays in improving transportation. Finally, Andy Alden with VTTI discussed a project VTTI is working on that allows vehicles to predict the condition of the roadways by measuring how the vehicles tires are interacting with the road. As roadway conditions change due to pavement properties, weather, or contamination this information can be shared across the Connected Vehicle system to provide alerts to approaching drivers as well as modified operational parameters for use by their vehicle’s onboard safety systems. There is still much research to be done with this project.

The last session was on ‘Connected Vehicles’ with speakers from VDOT, FHWA, Atkins, and ITERIS. Melissa Lance with VDOT discussed the Pooled Fund Study which prepares state and local transportation agencies for the deployment of connected vehicles. She discussed deployment projects, their benefits and challenges and the VA connected vehicle test bed that UVA, VTTI, and Morgan State University developed at the UVA University Transportation Center. Next, Deborah Curtis with FHWA discussed V2I research program. The goal of this program is to develop and integrate the infrastructure components necessary to provide the foundation for V2I deployment. She stated the challenges with mapping as there is no standard for it. Mapping plays a key role in V2I deployment. Following Deborah, Suzanne Murtha with Atkins discussed Connected Vehicle Deployments as well. Currently there are 16 existing deployments including intersection collision avoidance, traffic monitoring, curve speed warning, and airport taxi monitoring. Finally, David Brinkley with ITERIS discussed Connected Vehicle Reference Implementation Architecture (CVRIA) and the tools associated with CVRIA that are currently being developed to integrate connected vehicles. He stated that 10-20 years from now, 80% of vehicles will be equipped with connected technology in some way. Standardization is a critical component of implementation. CVRIA is providing input into the standardization process. Lastly, he briefly discussed SET-IT which is a tool for connected vehicle systems engineering. It will be released later this month.

The ITSVA Annual Conference provided attendees with a lot of information about what is currently happening in the transportation industry especially here in Virginia and where they are hoping to be in the next few years. We are looking forward to watching this technology and innovation unfold.