Which Way to the Smart Highway?
If you were asked to describe a smart highway, you might say it swiftly collects tolls. You might say it speeds the flow of goods. You might say it advances safety. You might even say it glows. And you might say, how on Earth do I merge onto this ribbon of wonder?
All that’s promised by myriad visions of the smart highway is nowhere near here yet, but some smart features already exist in some places. The technology is also being incorporated into the planning of major urban and suburban transportation-infrastructure projects.
Unlike the smart trucks and cars that are grabbing headlines, the smart highway seems to be slowly sneaking up on us. But that will change. As more highway users come to understand what intelligent roadways can offer trucking and society at large, more pressure will be directed at local, state, and federal government to speed their development by taking out regulatory speedbumps and spurring public and private investment.
To compare what’s here and now to what’s likely around the corner and what might be coming along somewhere down the road, it helps to start with a working definition of just what a smart highway is. Let’s peg it as a road with one or more intelligent and/or interactive technological features bolted onto it or built into its design.
Following that line of thinking, we can see that existing roads with overhead gantries to make toll collection faster and safer, or with weigh-station bypass systems to benefit truckers, as highways boasting smart features.
Where do we go from here?
Where the smart highway goes from here appears limited only by the imagination. Transportation engineers might argue that mundane but critical technical limits like bandwidths and network speeds may play a role in what smart features get rolled out first and where. But infrastructure funding, or …Read the rest of this story
