As ITS America prepares to return to ‘Motor City’ for its annual Conference & Expo, president and CEO Laura Chace explains why the 35th anniversary event promises to be one of the most immersive yet
Detroit holds a special place in the ITS community’s collective memory. For many in the industry it was here, at the ITS World Congress in 2014, where they took their first ride in an autonomous vehicle, with Honda notably taking delegates on rides at freeway speeds.
“Detroit is a great city for us,” says ITS America’s president and CEO Laura Chace. “ITS technologies need to work in concert with automotive and infrastructure, and in Detroit we’re right in the backyard of US automakers. People here are very up on transportation, they care about it.”
Indeed, such was the success of the 2014 event that ITS America returned to Motor City for its Annual Meeting 2018, but this June its Conference & Expo (running 9–12 June at Huntington Place) will hold special significance as the organisation will also be celebrating its 35th anniversary.
It’s an opportunity to take a look back at the beginnings of ITS and to chart how far the industry has come. “When ITS started in the early 1990s, they were really focused on localised, hardware-driven solutions,” says Chace. “In 2026 we’re in a hyper-connected, AI-powered, software-based ecosystem. We’re seeing so many new tools and new ways to bring solutions into the transportation system to make things safer, smarter and more efficient.”
To better demonstrate the deep integration of ITS in real-world scenarios, Detroit will see the return of integrated live demonstration experiences — a concept first piloted at last year’s ITS World Congress in Atlanta.
While live demonstrations traditionally involve individual vendors deploying their technology in parking lots or short stretches of dedicated roadway near to venues, the integrated format will see multiple solution providers contributing to end-to-end demonstrations running through real infrastructure managed by Michigan DOT.
“What we heard in Atlanta was that it made the technology very real,” says Chace. “It was very helpful to see how it integrates into a live operating system, as opposed to something set up off to the side for a demonstration.”
Detroit will host four of these integrated demonstrations (see box) with Michigan DOT as a close partner across all of them, and the OEMs are also expected to play a role. Chace confirms that discussions are ongoing with GM, Ford and Stellantis, the three major automakers based in the city. “They’re very interested and they will be engaged,” she says.
The backdrop to that engagement is encouraging. Chace points to the Haas Alert and Stellantis partnership as an example of how connected data is already flowing into production vehicles — pulling networked information to warn drivers of work zones, emergency vehicles and wrong-way driving events. “Around 90% of cars coming off the assembly lines are now connected,” she notes. “We want to be able to have a standardised environment to allow that information to come into all vehicles eventually — to give alerts and warnings to all drivers.”
The challenge, she acknowledges, is interoperability. Getting OEMs to share data and adopt common standards has historically been harder than aligning public agencies. “Everyone wants common interfaces and common data standards. The OEMs are very close to their customers — they want to understand what it’s going to look like in their interface,” says Chace. “That’s why we’re working to convene the national community around a national strategic approach to all of these digital technologies.”
University of Michigan’s MCity
A technical tour to nearby MCity, the University of Michigan’s real-world urban test environment, will also feature on the programme. The facility has evolved considerably since it first opened more than 10 years ago, and Chace highlights two developments in particular.
The first is what she describes as MCity 2.0 — a digital twin of the physical test environment, launched around 18 months ago, which allows researchers from anywhere in the world to access and control vehicles and traffic signals on the ground through the virtual environment. “It basically took what is a localised testing environment and made it accessible globally,” she says.
The second, launched within the last six months, is MAir: a dedicated test facility for advanced air mobility, encompassing drones and other UAV systems. Chace mentions a drone route already operating between MCity and New Lab in downtown Detroit, used to test uncrewed aerial systems — a detail that neatly connects two of the event’s demonstration venues. “I think the people who go on the tour will be able to get a sense of what they’re doing in that realm, and it’s really exciting and new,” she says.
“We’re seeing so many new tools and new ways to bring solutions into the transportation system to make things safer, smarter and more efficient
Beyond the headline use case of passenger air mobility, which remains someway from everyday usage, Chace sees substantial near-term opportunity for drones in DOT applications: traffic monitoring, emergency response, bridge and infrastructure inspection, and event management support. “There are just a lot of use cases evolving. And we’re seeing a lot of new ones,” she says.
Keynotes and themes
The conference theme is Empowering Innovation, with a keynotes confirmed from FHWA Administrator Sean McMaster, and Seval Oz, nominee for Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology at USDOT and currently serving as Special Advisor.
Meanwhile, the two main plenaries have been structured to reflect the anniversary moment: the first looking back at the journey from the sector’s origins to the present day; the second looking forward, exploring how the tools and technologies now available can be scaled into the future.
In terms of the evolution of transportation technology, automated vehicles provide a salient benchmark, with memories of those early demonstrations in Detroit providing a contrast with the real-world robotaxi deployments now underway across the USA. “Waymo is operating commercially in 10 cities, with around 10 more announced,” says Chace. “You’ve got automated freight being hauled in Texas. You’ve got public transit systems deploying automated vehicles. Automation is being deployed across different form factors.”
Part of the step change in automated vehicle capabilities has been the advance of AI systems right across ITS, where it has evolved from machine learning into something altogether more human-like. “It used to be that you had to be a software engineer to effectively interact with these tools. Now you can talk to them,” says Chace. “A traffic engineer can query their system and get the data and insights they need just by describing the problem in plain language. That’s totally different from how we’ve been used to interacting with data.”
Quality data remains the bedrock of ITS systems. ITS America’s own AI committee is focused on data governance, security and privacy — the infrastructure, as Chace puts it, that public agencies need to put in place before they can genuinely trust AI-generated outputs: “You could query data and get an output. But if you don’t trust it, or don’t really know it’s accurate, it’s not going to be all that helpful.”
Chace flags two further events on the ITS America calendar in 2026. The ITS World Congress takes place in South Korea in October and for the first time the organisation is hosting an Innovation Forum in the autumn, designed to look at technologies and trends on a five-to-ten year horizon.
In June all eyes will once again be on Detroit, as the city that has been at the forefront of the US auto industry for over a century cements it reputation at the heart of developing the future of transportation.
This article first appeared in the April/May issue of TTi.
Watch out for the full version of this interview in the next episode of the Transportation Podcast from Traffic Technology International.
