Transportation

Vehicle Infrastructure Integration in the United states Over the past 15 years, a primary focus of U.S. ITS policy has been an initiative initially called Vehicle In- frastructure Integration (VII). The objective of the VII
initiative was to deploy and enable a communications infrastructure that supports vehicle-to-infrastructure, as well as vehicle-to-vehicle, communications for a va- riety of vehicle safety applications and transportation operations.¹⁴⁴ Despite more than 15 years of research and testing, but with VII still far from operation- al deployment, at the end of 2007 the U.S. Depart- ment of Transportation announced the VII program would undergo a full reassessment. The Department of Transportation opened up every aspect of the VII program—from providers, technologies, and wireless communications methods, to business models and public-private partnerships—for reevaluation, issuing a wide ranging request for information to solicit input from interested stakeholders on these issues.

The agency decided to reframe the VII approach from the originally envisioned, all-encompassing “all and everywhere” nationwide rollout approach to one marked by incremental deployments that lean towards ‘near-term’ quick-win technologies and applications.¹⁴⁵ The new approach would place increased empha- sis on the involvement of the aftermarket sector and bring multimodality (integration across transportation modes) to the fore. A focus of the 2007 VII program review was revisiting a series of decisions that had ef- fectively excluded the after-market sector from the VII scene. Given that it takes at least 14 years (and of- ten several decades) for a country’s vehicle population to refresh, intelligent transportation solutions have to be designed that not only work with newer vehicles but can also be retrofitted to older vehicles so as not to exclude a significant portion of drivers (especially the socially or economically disadvantaged) from par- ticipating in VII’s benefits. This had been a criticism raised even by the supporters of the VII initiative in its original form.

The review of the United States’ vehicle infrastructure integration program culminated in a decision on Janu- ary 9, 2009, to rebrand the VII initiative under the new moniker IntelliDrive.¹⁴⁶ On January 10, 2010, RITA announced a new ITS Strategic Plan, a five-year plan to achieve a national, multi-modal surface transporta- tion system that features a connected transportation environment among vehicles, the infrastructure, and portable devices that leverages wireless communica- tions technology to maximize safety, mobility, and environmental performance. At the core of the ITS Strategic Plan will be IntelliDrive, a suite of technolo- gies and applications that use wireless communications to provide connectivity: 1) with and between vehicles of all types, 2) between vehicles and roadway infra- structure, and 3) between vehicles, infrastructure, and wireless consumer devices. In announcing the ITS Strategic Plan, the JPO made an important decision to move forward with DSRC at the 5.9GHz spectrum as the standard for wireless connectivity for IntelliDrive. (This puts the United States in-line with Japan, South Korea, and most European countries, which have also elected to use DSRC wireless technology in their intel- ligent transportation systems.) The ITS Strategic Plan essentially articulates a five-year research plan to ascer- tain the technical feasibility of IntelliDrive, the value of such a system, its policy and safety ramifications, and to make a go/no-go decision by 2014 on moving forward with a national deployment of IntelliDrive.