The road to smarter highways
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
A couple of developments this week in intelligent transportation provide a glimpse of America's future highways.
- Cavnue is bringing its smart road technology to one of America's busiest freight corridors at the Port of Savannah.
- Haas Alert, whose digital notifications let drivers know about road hazards like emergency vehicles or construction, has a new deal with AI-powered dashcam company Nexar to enhance its services.
Why it matters: Both technologies are designed to enable collaboration between vehicles and roads for safer, more efficient transportation.
Zoom in: Cavnue plans to transform State Route 307 — the critical artery feeding the nation's third-largest container port — into a smart freight corridor that could one day enable automated trucking.
- Cavnue's platform combines roadside hardware — sensors, computing and advanced communications equipment — with intelligent software to provide agencies with real-time data and insights about traffic, weather, debris and other road conditions.
- The company is building a similar freight corridor in Texas and is preparing to extend its original smart highway on Interstate 94 in Michigan.
Haas Alert, meanwhile, is fusing its Safety Cloud real-time hazard and incident alerts with Nexar's wide-scale data collection to provide visual verification of road conditions in real time and deliver that data directly to participating vehicles.
- Haas' Safety Cloud alerts are available today in Jeep, Dodge, RAM, Chrysler, and Volkswagen vehicles, as well as through navigation apps like Waze.
The big picture: By increasing driver awareness of road conditions, both of these vehicle-to-infrastructure technologies can lead to fewer accidents and less congestion.
- Longer term, their road awareness tech can feed into assisted-driving and autonomous vehicle systems.
