Greg Winfree, JD, agency director of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, looks to a future in which connected vehicles act as weather sensors, helping other drivers to know what’s up ahead and avoid or plan for extreme, unexpected situations
In Subterranean Homesick Blues, Bob Dylan claims that “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Sure, weather forecasts are easy to joke about because they’re attempts to predict the weather, which is notoriously unpredictable. But what if, while you’re traveling on the road, you could know in real time what’s happening with the weather just up the road?
In recent decades, weather volatility has increased – we’ve seen stronger hurricanes, more frequent wildfires, harsher winters and hotter summers – and all can pose safety hazards for travelers. This is especially true when traveler information about imminent roadway conditions is hours old.
“Road weather tech holds a lot of promise for saving lives, and it can even help planners evaluate how to build resilient infrastructure assets to make them last longer”
If you’re familiar with Waze, the travel planning app, you know it’s amazingly accurate in its travel time estimates. While Waze uses a predictive model not unlike the weatherman’s, it supplements that method with crowdsourced data from drivers reporting in real time. Remove the driver sourcing and expand the model to include embedded roadway sensors, onboard vehicle sensors and more traditional data sources (e.g. public weather stations), and you’ve got a pretty good idea what road weather technology is all about.
Road-weather tech embraces the philosophy of V2X connectivity. This enables instantaneous communication – literally, at the speed of light – across the web of connected infrastructure, vehicles, and traditional data sources about how weather is impacting roadways. If a road sensor detects black ice on a bridge, for example, that data can be transmitted to vehicles well in advance, giving drivers the information they need to traverse the bridge safely or to take a route where there isn’t any black ice at all.
At the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, we’ve led the way in helping develop proactive roadway safety management systems. One example is the Harris County Flood Warning System in Houston, Texas, which is especially useful in directing traffic to safer routes before, during and after hurricanes and other high-water events. Currently, we’re partners on a USDOT grant examining road weather awareness across 300 miles of the Texas highway system. The goal is to reduce injuries and fatalities by leveraging technology to give travelers information to make smarter routing decisions when bad weather creates dangerous travel conditions.
Road weather tech holds a lot of promise for saving lives, and it can even help planners evaluate how to build resilient infrastructure assets to make them last longer. The future possibilities are as endless as the data is deep. Your local weather reporter should be jealous.
Greg Winfree is a member of ITS America’s Board of Directors and a former US Assistant Secretary of Transportation. The column first appeared in the March edition of TTi magazine
