An engineer with the Utah Department of Transportation was on a panel at one of the world’s most influential technology events, the Consumer Electronics Trade Show.
Transportation Technology Engineer, Blain Leonard, represented the future of connected and autonomous vehicles on a panel about future smart cities. Leonard said UDOT is ahead of most other states in this area.
“We’re viewed as one of the leaders in this technology,” he said.
Connected vehicle technology allows cars to communicate with other vehicles and traffic signals, without the driver having to do a thing. Utah’s been using it for over ten years. It was first rolled out on Redwood Rd. in 2014. Since then it’s expanded to more areas, and now used in UDOT snow plows and UTA buses.
“We’ve developed some technologies to allow messages to be sent into the cockpit of the car warning a driver of an icy road condition or high wind,” said Leonard.
Those alerts could be a display on the windshield, or an audio message. And communication goes both ways.
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“If the bus for instance is behind schedule, it sends us a message and says can you help me get back on schedule, can you give me a little extra green time at the signal. And if the signal can do it, it does.”
In the very near future, this tech will go beyond fleet vehicles UDOT has control of.
“Ford for instance has announced that they’re putting these kinds of communication technologies in their cars starting next year. We want to be ready to communicate with Ford,” said Leonard.
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More companies will follow suit, and UDOT wants to be ready. The connected vehicle technology will also benefit autonomous vehicles. In the future an automated vehicle’s view may be blocked by a big truck, and it’s unable to see what color the traffic light is.
“Our connected vehicle system can tell the car whether it’s red, yellow or green, and when it’s going to change.”
Leonard said through all of this UDOT’s number one focus is safety. They are also working to expose more people to the tech so drivers can get comfortable with it.
