Intersection Connected vehicles can improve safety at busy intersections -image US DOT
Leo McCloskey, ITS America’s senior vice president for Technical Programs, talks to Jason Barnes about what the recent NHTSA ruling on light vehicle connectivity means for cooperative infrastructures in North America.
In early February the US Department of Transportation’s (USDOT’s)834 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced it had decided to start taking steps to enable Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication technology for light vehicles. In so doing, the many safety-related applications that vehicle and ITS professionals have been developing and testing took a major step closer to wider real-world deployment in North America.
The announcement was warmly greeted by ITS professionals, many of whom had harboured concerns that there would be no ‘decision’ at all. However, a ruling on light vehicle connectivity is but a First step – heavy goods vehicles, infrastructure and nomadic devices still have to be brought into the connected traveller fold. Meanwhile, there is lobbying from outside the ITS industry to have the frequency spectrum allocated by the US2115 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for road safety-related applications opened up to other uses including mobile infotainment. This commercially inspired development could yet have repercussions in terms of global system interoperability.
560 ITS America’s senior vice president for Technical Programs, feels the announcement makes a positive decisions on other aspects of the connected vehicle environment more likely to happen.
“It dovetails nicely with the work that’s been done over the last couple of years by initiatives such as the Safety Pilot model deployment in Ann Arbor, Michigan. There, 3,000 vehicles from different manufacturers have been interacting with each other, applying V2V for safety applications that have been very positively received at the user level – once participants in the deployment have experienced the applications, they don’t want to give them up,” he says.
The Michigan deployments will undergo a significant extension in 2015/16, growing to encompass 30,000 vehicles and including linking infrastructure, such as signal phase timing, with the vehicles’ onboard applications. McCloskey points to this work and the establishment of large-scale ITS corridors in Europe and in Japan as evidence of the critical mass being attained by cooperative infrastructures and the benefits they can bring to both transport networks and wider society.
Worries over a ‘non-decision’ were driven in part by general economic concerns as well as persisting legislative issues relating to privacy and tracking. Indeed, at the time of the announcement, officials were at pains to highlight that V2V communication does not constitute a move towards a greater data collection and storage effort or an invasion of privacy. Despite the ITS sector now being several decades old, McCloskey thinks privacy, as a topic, requires a sophistication of conversation for which the US market is still not ready.
“We’re still behind the curve on this. Privacy remains a big issue and keeps coming to the fore for a number of reasons. But in a digital world, framing the conversation just in terms of privacy is wrong – can we really consider that privacy still exists in a world of website cookies and mobile devices? Also, for a host of security and service assurance reasons we need people to be trusted actors in the connected environment. The systems should provide and guarantee anonymity but we can’t undertake to offer people privacy if a cooperative transportation system and, eventually, an autonomous system are to happen.”
If anything, as the stakeholder set broadens, he feels progress on such issues will slow.
“It’s very difficult to get a large number of individuals and groups to align around the same issues at the same time. A challenge in the connected vehicle space is that at present there’s no single message that stakeholders can coalesce around.”
There are public-sector campaigns with a single theme, he notes, such as those promoting the wearing of seatbelts, but the automotive industry is very fragmented in terms of vehicle connectivity messages. In some cases, McCloskey is not convinced that the auto companies can align for competitive and legal reasons but he thinks, over time, common safety messages will emerge from the cooperative ITS/V2V environment.
“We’ve got the first of several elements of the bigger picture. That lends credibility and facilitates deployments. It also allows the automotive industry to plan product lifecycles. The assurance this decision gives is a real shot in the arm in that respect; private industry can take it as a signal that something is about to happen.”
Already, though, it is opening the way to second-level discussions which need to take place. McCloskey points, for instance, to the US’s current lack of a common data policy.
“We need to think about what information is captured, how it’s organised, where it resides and who has access to it. Private capital will want access – think of insurance companies, for instance – but the other side of connected vehicles is that we’re going to need a transportation system in which data collection has an element of predictability. Anonymised usage data is a valuable product of a cooperative transportation system that should not compromise individual liberty and should be monetised for the benefit of the system. As the old adage goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
Achieving this, given the country’s system of government, may be difficult: “The European Union has common policies and a common legislative environment. In the US, each state has several layers of government and when it comes to the collection and realisation of data, everyone can do things in their own way. Software implementers don’t have common targets to shoot for and it means that, for example, a DOT in Mississippi might see something good being done by a peer organisation in North Dakota but then be left with no way of emulating it. Software incompatibility challenges are not an issue the public purse can sustain.”
And then there is frequency spectrum allocation, something which McCloskey feels is threatening to obscure a lot of the good V2V work.
“For all sorts of really good reasons at the time, we in the US made spectrum allocations which if you started now you wouldn’t do things in the same way. Everyone’s consuming more data and if you could just shuffle things around a bit you’d be able to give the communications companies the bandwidths they say they need. There’s a lot of ‘white space’ in the TV spectrum that could be used to give ‘Super Wi-Fi’ without affecting performance, for example.
“What we need is an honest conversation over the needs of transportation network safety versus demand from entertainment services. Long-term, the ambitions for vehicle autonomy are going to require us to be highly communicative, whereas the bandwidth ‘needs’ for entertainment in the future are speculative.”
That should not excuse us from testing whether the shared use of spectrum is possible without compromising safety, McCloskey says.
“ITS America’s position is that we don’t support compromising safety. Safety service deployment is in everyone’s interest and has to work all of the time.
“We need to start the discussion but this isn’t a sprint – the FCC wants to conduct tests and said no decision will be taken before those have been carried out. Impartial experts will lead that testing, but the reality is that there are actors out in the larger system who are pushing a non-scientific argument based on market and opportunity. This focuses on revenue opportunities for service providers and consumer demand for services. It is not, for example, an equal opportunities issue where people are looking to increase bandwidth availability to underserved sections of the community. ITS America would like to see rationality drive the debate. The rational discussion assumes that testing will occur and that engineering disciplines will provide objective guidance on feasibility. We’d very much like for that to play out, for objectivity through expert analysis to guide the decision.”
There are potential international implications of this domestic wrangling because if frequency allocations fail to take heed of those abroad, the car companies may be obliged to build different models for different regions.
McCloskey, though, is rather sanguine; “What nobody’s talking about is removing safety from the spectrum. What is being put forward is a case for sharing spectrum space with safety.
“We need to work on our messages. From an international perspective the automotive companies will be able to rely on 5.9GHz still being there. Everyone should shoot for that but the issue is whether we get 200 or 75 or 50MHz for safety; whether it’s the full spectrum or not, there’ll be some space for safety although there may be some increased complexity in the software coding.
“We perhaps need to look at this in a different way. We can view it through the lens of risk but also view it through the lens of opportunity. No-one is saying that V2V-based safety applications won’t happen but they might happen in a different way to how we originally anticipated. So, full speed ahead on testing and scaling and let the science dictate how the spectrum is utilised.”
In early February the US Department of Transportation’s (USDOT’s)
The announcement was warmly greeted by ITS professionals, many of whom had harboured concerns that there would be no ‘decision’ at all. However, a ruling on light vehicle connectivity is but a First step – heavy goods vehicles, infrastructure and nomadic devices still have to be brought into the connected traveller fold. Meanwhile, there is lobbying from outside the ITS industry to have the frequency spectrum allocated by the US
Positive vibes
Nevertheless, Leo McCloskey,“It dovetails nicely with the work that’s been done over the last couple of years by initiatives such as the Safety Pilot model deployment in Ann Arbor, Michigan. There, 3,000 vehicles from different manufacturers have been interacting with each other, applying V2V for safety applications that have been very positively received at the user level – once participants in the deployment have experienced the applications, they don’t want to give them up,” he says.
The Michigan deployments will undergo a significant extension in 2015/16, growing to encompass 30,000 vehicles and including linking infrastructure, such as signal phase timing, with the vehicles’ onboard applications. McCloskey points to this work and the establishment of large-scale ITS corridors in Europe and in Japan as evidence of the critical mass being attained by cooperative infrastructures and the benefits they can bring to both transport networks and wider society.
Worries over a ‘non-decision’ were driven in part by general economic concerns as well as persisting legislative issues relating to privacy and tracking. Indeed, at the time of the announcement, officials were at pains to highlight that V2V communication does not constitute a move towards a greater data collection and storage effort or an invasion of privacy. Despite the ITS sector now being several decades old, McCloskey thinks privacy, as a topic, requires a sophistication of conversation for which the US market is still not ready.
“We’re still behind the curve on this. Privacy remains a big issue and keeps coming to the fore for a number of reasons. But in a digital world, framing the conversation just in terms of privacy is wrong – can we really consider that privacy still exists in a world of website cookies and mobile devices? Also, for a host of security and service assurance reasons we need people to be trusted actors in the connected environment. The systems should provide and guarantee anonymity but we can’t undertake to offer people privacy if a cooperative transportation system and, eventually, an autonomous system are to happen.”
If anything, as the stakeholder set broadens, he feels progress on such issues will slow.
“It’s very difficult to get a large number of individuals and groups to align around the same issues at the same time. A challenge in the connected vehicle space is that at present there’s no single message that stakeholders can coalesce around.”
There are public-sector campaigns with a single theme, he notes, such as those promoting the wearing of seatbelts, but the automotive industry is very fragmented in terms of vehicle connectivity messages. In some cases, McCloskey is not convinced that the auto companies can align for competitive and legal reasons but he thinks, over time, common safety messages will emerge from the cooperative ITS/V2V environment.
Follow-on work
McCloskey sees this latest announcement as setting an important precedent: “A decision on heavy vehicles’ connectivity is due this year, and we can also expect to see next-level guidance on in-vehicle nomadic devices. A decision on infrastructure is expected in 2015.“We’ve got the first of several elements of the bigger picture. That lends credibility and facilitates deployments. It also allows the automotive industry to plan product lifecycles. The assurance this decision gives is a real shot in the arm in that respect; private industry can take it as a signal that something is about to happen.”
Already, though, it is opening the way to second-level discussions which need to take place. McCloskey points, for instance, to the US’s current lack of a common data policy.
“We need to think about what information is captured, how it’s organised, where it resides and who has access to it. Private capital will want access – think of insurance companies, for instance – but the other side of connected vehicles is that we’re going to need a transportation system in which data collection has an element of predictability. Anonymised usage data is a valuable product of a cooperative transportation system that should not compromise individual liberty and should be monetised for the benefit of the system. As the old adage goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
Achieving this, given the country’s system of government, may be difficult: “The European Union has common policies and a common legislative environment. In the US, each state has several layers of government and when it comes to the collection and realisation of data, everyone can do things in their own way. Software implementers don’t have common targets to shoot for and it means that, for example, a DOT in Mississippi might see something good being done by a peer organisation in North Dakota but then be left with no way of emulating it. Software incompatibility challenges are not an issue the public purse can sustain.”
And then there is frequency spectrum allocation, something which McCloskey feels is threatening to obscure a lot of the good V2V work.
“For all sorts of really good reasons at the time, we in the US made spectrum allocations which if you started now you wouldn’t do things in the same way. Everyone’s consuming more data and if you could just shuffle things around a bit you’d be able to give the communications companies the bandwidths they say they need. There’s a lot of ‘white space’ in the TV spectrum that could be used to give ‘Super Wi-Fi’ without affecting performance, for example.
“What we need is an honest conversation over the needs of transportation network safety versus demand from entertainment services. Long-term, the ambitions for vehicle autonomy are going to require us to be highly communicative, whereas the bandwidth ‘needs’ for entertainment in the future are speculative.”
That should not excuse us from testing whether the shared use of spectrum is possible without compromising safety, McCloskey says.
“ITS America’s position is that we don’t support compromising safety. Safety service deployment is in everyone’s interest and has to work all of the time.
“We need to start the discussion but this isn’t a sprint – the FCC wants to conduct tests and said no decision will be taken before those have been carried out. Impartial experts will lead that testing, but the reality is that there are actors out in the larger system who are pushing a non-scientific argument based on market and opportunity. This focuses on revenue opportunities for service providers and consumer demand for services. It is not, for example, an equal opportunities issue where people are looking to increase bandwidth availability to underserved sections of the community. ITS America would like to see rationality drive the debate. The rational discussion assumes that testing will occur and that engineering disciplines will provide objective guidance on feasibility. We’d very much like for that to play out, for objectivity through expert analysis to guide the decision.”
There are potential international implications of this domestic wrangling because if frequency allocations fail to take heed of those abroad, the car companies may be obliged to build different models for different regions.
McCloskey, though, is rather sanguine; “What nobody’s talking about is removing safety from the spectrum. What is being put forward is a case for sharing spectrum space with safety.
“We need to work on our messages. From an international perspective the automotive companies will be able to rely on 5.9GHz still being there. Everyone should shoot for that but the issue is whether we get 200 or 75 or 50MHz for safety; whether it’s the full spectrum or not, there’ll be some space for safety although there may be some increased complexity in the software coding.
“We perhaps need to look at this in a different way. We can view it through the lens of risk but also view it through the lens of opportunity. No-one is saying that V2V-based safety applications won’t happen but they might happen in a different way to how we originally anticipated. So, full speed ahead on testing and scaling and let the science dictate how the spectrum is utilised.”
