High-Tech Wireless Communication for Transportation
The Volpe Center brought together leaders from the private sector, academia, and government to explore how advanced telecommunications technologies might be leveraged to achieve measurable reductions in vehicle crashes and congestion.
A new report, Advanced Wireless Communication for the Transportation Sector, summarizes this successful roundtable that brought together 40 leading experts in the field of wireless communications. The report reveals that significant opportunities exist to make use of expertise in wireless communications and related technologies. The new language of technology including wiki collaboration, mash-ups, and Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, or MANETs represents challenges, but more importantly, potential opportunities for growth.
Harnessing and rapidly deploying these emerging communications technologies will lead to fewer crashes on our roadways and result in overall improvements in the performance of the transportation system. Such efforts will also result in improved situational awareness, including dynamic rerouting, signal timing and synchronization based on real-time data, and evolving traffic and weather conditions. Electronic tolling and fees for all modes of transit can be enabled through existing technologies as well as through development of mobile electronic devices. Finally, bridges, roads, rails, and other critical infrastructure can be monitored remotely, leading to improved operations of the nation's transportation enterprise.
