First look: America's smartest highway
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Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
A three-mile stretch of I-94 in Michigan offers a glimpse of America's future highways, with tech-enabled lanes for connected and automated vehicles that could one day let drivers sit back and relax.
Why it matters: The interstate highway system revolutionized transportation in the 1950s and 60s. But cars and trucks are getting smarter, so roadways must, too.
- Roadside technology can provide important situational awareness to automated and semi-automated vehicles, helping to make roads safer, more efficient and less congested.
Driving the news: Cavnue, a Washington, D.C.-based subsidiary of Alphabet's Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, just finished construction on the pilot phase of a first-of-its-kind connected corridor in Michigan.
- For now, the tech is providing real-time data and insights about traffic, weather, potholes, obstacles and other road conditions to Michigan's Department of Transportation (MDOT).
- Longer term, it'll feed information and advisories directly to connected and automated vehicles traveling in dedicated lanes along a 40-mile stretch of I-94 between Detroit and Ann Arbor.
- The ultimate goal: cars and roads collaborating for more efficient transportation.
Zoom in: A second smart corridor is opening later this year or early next near Austin, Texas — an ideal location, given Texas' emergence as a hub for driverless trucking development.
- In both locations, Cavnue will provide vehicles with key information about the road a mile or two ahead, beyond their sensors' line of sight.
- That added awareness could boost confidence and accelerate the safe deployment of fully driverless cars and trucks, says Cavnue CEO Tyler Duvall, who spent nearly a decade at the U.S. Department of Transportation.
How it works: Technology poles located every 200 meters along the "smart" roadways include a sensor pod, a compute pod and advanced communications equipment. (Physical improvements include better lighting and "high friction" pavement.)
- For now, the system uses cameras to observe the roadway — but radar could be added later, Cavnue says.
- Images captured by those cameras are synthesized into real-time insights using AI and machine learning algorithms.
- The system can see and instantaneously identify a stalled vehicle, an accident, an animal or any other potential hazard in the roadway, such as pooling water from a sudden downpour.
- It then sends alerts to MDOT and to connected vehicles on the roadway.
Such alerts can help drivers — human or robot — prepare for traffic slowdowns further in advance, reducing both congestion and emissions.
- Plus, they can help road authorities improve maintenance and incident response times.
Reality check: Not all vehicles can "talk" to roadside infrastructure.
- But even if 1 out of 100 cars responds to in-vehicle guidance alerts, it can shorten the amount of time all vehicles spend in "phantom" traffic jams, says Cavnue, citing a European study.
- Cavnue expects half of cars to have some level of automation by the early 2030s.
What they're saying: "Cavnue's completion of the work to launch a pilot project on I-94 between Ann Arbor and Detroit will keep Michigan on the cutting edge of mobility," Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer said in a statement.
What's next: Cavnue is preparing to launch two more connected corridor projects: another in Texas and one in the Southeast.
