Life in the Smart Lane : Road to a High-Tech Transit System Paved With Opportunities

It’s hard to envision if you’re stuck in Southern California’s weekday commuter crawl, but the land that gave freeway gridlock to the nation is poised to help unclog the freeways.

From the recently opened “smart corridor” on the Santa Monica Freeway to the California Test Bed projects in Orange County, a loose consortium of private industry, academia and government transportation agencies is working to create a seamless system of information, navigation and traffic management tools that will help speed us on our appointed rounds.

It is all part of a fast-developing industry called intelligent transportation that is creating business opportunities across the country.

This is not the intelligent transportation that futurists have sketched out for us: commuters leaning back with the morning paper while crash-proof, hydrogen-fueled, pre-programmed personal transit vehicles whisk them down the automated highway and into office building parking lots.

Instead, the intelligent transportation industry that has developed over the last decade is bent on combining sometimes doddering technologies such as electronically controlled traffic signals with newer ones such as computers, cell phones and orbiting satellites.

“People think this is still all out there in science fiction, but it’s not,” said John Stearns, an intelligent-transportation specialist (ITS) and director of Project California. “The technology is all there, and businesses are already making the products we need.”

The key now is merging what industry is producing into traffic systems that, for the most part, are not very well coordinated, said Stearns, whose organization was formed by the state in 1991 to encourage development of an intelligent transportation systems industry.

If federal Transportation Secretary Federico Pena and his advisors are correct, continued growth of the industry means that in 15 years, the average commute in Southern California will take 15% less time than it does now, reducing gas and oil consumption and improving air quality and drivers’ tempers.

And business growth seems assured: An estimated $210 billion will be spent on so-called ITS projects in the United States by 2010, according to government and industry estimates. About 15% of the total, or nearly $32 billion, will be spent in California, where the nation’s ITS industry got its start in the ashes of the defense industry and where many of the most ambitious projects are underway, said Patrick Conroy, ITS chief for the California Department of Transportation.

The potential benefit to the state’s economy is substantial. Said Robert Ratcliff, manager of the California Alliance for Advanced Transportation Systems, a Diamond Bar-based ITS business development group: “We figure this industry has the potential of adding 272,000 new jobs in the state by 2010.”

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The industry has three parts: traveler information, traffic management and the still-experimental field of automated highways. A number of California businesses and universities, as well as Caltrans, are major players in all three.

Traveler information includes systems that deliver real-time traffic maps, directions, routes and public transit schedules. One example is global positioning systems (GPS) based on the precision navigation technology developed for the military by Seal Beach-based Rockwell International. The company has also developed civilian uses for GPS, which uses electronic signals from a network of 24 satellites to establish the location of a receiving device to within 35 feet of its position almost anywhere on Earth.

Rockwell is one of a dozen U.S. and Japanese companies making GPS devices for autos that display turn-by-turn maps (most produced by two Northern California companies) on dashboard-mounted screens and give voice instructions to the driver. Rockwell signed a deal with Hertz Corp. last summer to install 7,500 of its systems in rental cars.

The next step is to develop ways to broadcast highway information directly to GPS-equipped cars so drivers can receive instructions on alternate routes in time to use them, say ITS specialists such as UC Irvine transportation program director Wilfred Recker.

Rockwell also has contracts to use its GPS technology to help develop up-to-the-minute traveler information systems for the Orange County Transit Authority and the city of Santa Ana. They will be more localized versions of the pioneering Yosemite Area Traveler Information network, which provides traffic and tourist information to travelers who use interactive kiosks in towns on the approaches to the national park.

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On the traffic management front, the $50-million Santa Monica Freeway “smart corridor” that opened last month is one of the nation’s first publicly visible ITS projects.

Overhead signs alert the freeway’s motorists to accidents and other tie-ups ahead, and electronic signs installed on streets paralleling the corridor direct them around the obstacles.

But the smart corridor isn’t all that smart--it still needs people to make decisions. An advanced version of the system is scheduled to be launched next year along the 405 Freeway through Irvine. It will use new computerized equipment and software that can “learn” from experience and actually make suggestions for handling different types of traffic situations.

Human traffic managers in control rooms in Irvine and at Caltrans’ state-of-the-art District 12 traffic management center in Santa Ana will be able to use the computer-generated suggestions to speed up response time, said Irvine traffic engineer John Thai.

The Irvine system is part of the California Test Bed, an ambitious state- and federally funded project that by 1998 should be providing hundreds of ITS businesses a real-world arena in which to test their new technologies.

Another piece of the Test Bed is in Anaheim, where the focus is on managing the traffic that crowd-drawing attractions pump onto surface streets. With Disneyland and the Anaheim Stadium-Pond sports and special-events complex all squeezed into a few square miles, Anaheim provides the perfect laboratory, said Joe Hecker, Caltrans division chief for Orange County.

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It’s no accident that Southern California has become a hotbed of intelligent transportation development. Federal budget cuts and an economic recession sharply reduced the state’s defense and aerospace industries in the early 1990s, and government and industry officials needed something to bolster the state’s industrial base.

They decided that two areas filled the bill: telecommunications and intelligent transportation.

Southern California, the state’s most congested region, became the center of the ITS effort, and Orange County became the chief test site.

“It’s pretty simple. If you can solve a problem on the Los Angeles-area freeways, you can solve it anywhere,” said Michael Patten, head of Pennsylvania State University’s intelligent transportation systems center.

So far, about 100 businesses in the state and nearly 650 nationwide are involved in intelligent transportation. They range from giants such as General Motors, Rockwell and Hughes Aircraft to entrepreneurial companies such as Alice Lei’s three-person Nightengale Technologies in Huntington Beach.

Lei says she started her systems integration and testing business four years ago after she was laid off from her aerospace engineering job with McDonnell Douglas’ space division. She went after contracts in the ITS arena partly because a lot of her aerospace work was transportation-related and partly because as she went to vendor fairs and seminars on developing technologies, looking for things to do, “intelligent transportation kept coming up as the hot new area.”

John Cox, president of the Southern California Economic Partnership, an intelligent-transportation systems business development group, said the entrepreneurs are growing fast.

“The big aerospace companies are tied up with big-scale projects, and a lot of ITS now is in small, regional projects that have to get done fast,” he said.

Sean Wong, manager of National Engineering Technology’s Western regional office in La Mirada, has 50 employees, 30 of whom are former aerospace engineers and computer programmers who were laid off in the late 1980s or early ‘90s as government defense and space contracts dried up.

The company has succeeded as a major ITS software designer “because we can combine the talents of people like me, the traditional traffic engineer, with the technological knowledge that the former aerospace people bring with them,” Wong said.

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But ITS doesn’t guarantee success, as Thomas Peterson is discovering with a business that, on the surface, seemed like a sure thing.

A career traffic and transportation system manager, Peterson decided in the late 1980s that there was a market in supplying drivers with the fastest routes to their daily destinations, especially if he could provide real-time route corrections to motorists while they were traveling.

He quit his job as vice president of a Bay Area freight terminal company, cashed in his assets, mortgaged his house and in 1990 started Traffic Assist.

Peterson said he has spent nearly $1 million of mainly his own money and still isn’t making a profit. He’d originally hoped to sell the company to cellular phone service providers, who could offer it as an extra to help induce people to sign up with their systems. But there hasn’t been enough competition to make such inducements necessary, he said. Trial programs with both LA Cellular and Nextel have expired with no deals forthcoming, he said.

Part of the problem may be that Peterson’s is an idea ahead of its time. Only three counties in the state--Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego--have enough traffic-monitoring equipment installed to enable Traffic Assist to generate accurate travel time calculations.

The company obtained a U.S. patent this year, and Peterson says he hopes to interest some of the GPS navigation system makers in licensing his patent for their own products.

Meanwhile, the few motorists who call Traffic Assist’s offices in Los Angeles or San Diego get the service for free.

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One information provider making a go of it is San Diego’s Maxwell Technologies.

A defense contractor for most of its 30 years, Maxwell has converted to the commercial world, said Kenneth Potashner, the former Silicon Valley executive recruited as president earlier this year to speed up the switch.

The bulk of the company’s business involves high-energy pulsed-power products, but as a sideline to its military work, Maxwell has had a small Internet unit since the days when scientists and academics were the main users.

“We started looking for commercial applications for the Internet and decided that real-time traffic information was a killer,” said Rachel Sandmann, director of Maxwell’s Internet technologies group.

The company went online with maps using Caltrans traffic flow data in San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles counties in 1994. It landed the contract to do the same for Atlanta’s transit agency as part of the traffic management program for the Olympic Games last summer.

And Maxwell recently signed a deal to provide its Southern California maps, updated every 30-seconds, to Yahoo, the Internet service provider. Computer users can get the Maxwell/Caltrans maps and other area traffic information on the Yahoo Los Angeles Web page (https://www.layahoo.com).

Only 10 of Maxwell’s 550 employees and $1.6 million of its $80 million in annual revenue are related to intelligent transportation now, but Sandmann said she, like others in the industry, expects that area of business to grow rapidly because of the state and federal emphasis on ITS.

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Even with hundreds of cities still to be equipped with the most basic of traffic management and traveler information systems, researchers are already working on the Buck Rogersish concept of hands-off driving.

A test in San Diego County next August will see radio-controlled cars traveling in a dedicated highway lane for the first time ever in the U.S. The test, on Interstate 15, will turn drivers into passengers as their vehicles are controlled remotely from a Caltrans traffic management station.

The same I-15 corridor was used earlier this year for a successful test of collision-avoidance equipment that enabled drivers to tuck into high-speed, densely packed “trains” in which the cars were separated by just a few feet. Radar sensors linked to engine speed controllers kept the cars from colliding.

Engineers at Ford, GM and Chrysler are working on a “smart” or adaptive cruise control that will automatically slow vehicles before they come dangerously close to one another.

Although such automated-control technology is here, it comes with a lot of baggage. There’s the problem of paying to wire hundreds of thousands of miles of dedicated traffic lanes and the task of persuading motorists that they want to give up control of their vehicles. And there’s the chore of sorting out liability issues, which is likely to block progress for years to come, industry watchers say.

“Imagine the lawsuits if a system that was running cars 3 feet apart at 70 miles an hour suddenly went down,” said Recker, the UCI transportation program director, with a shudder.

So the major focus, ITS specialists say, is likely to remain on traveler information and traffic management. Even so, said James Moore, USC professor of urban planning and civil engineering, “there’s no doubt that this is creating a lot of . . . opportunities.”

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Early Detection, Quick Response

Technology used at Caltrans’ District 12 Advanced Transportation Management Center in Santa Ana saves lives and money by keeping freeways moving. Three similar but less technologically advanced centers are in Los Angeles, San Diego and Riverside. How the new transportation technology works in one scenario:

1. Tanker truck jackknifes on northbound San Diego Freeway. Disabled rig blocks two inside lanes, causing chain-reaction collision involving three cars. Driver of first car is killed. Truck begins leaking toxic chemicals.

2. Caltrans computer determines from loop detectors and surveillance cameras that traffic in three inside lanes is stopped. Computer sets off flashing indicator on control center map to pinpoint the site.

3. Traffic engineer focuses closed-circuit cameras on the site, surveys accident scene and dispatches CHP officers, tow trucks and two ambulances. Because of spill and severity of accident, hazardous-materials unit and CHP helicopter also sent.

4. Motorist uses call box to notify CHP of accident. CHP dispatch relays caller’s information to Caltrans traffic engineer. Details provided by motorist prompt traffic engineer to send additional ambulance.

5. Mobile signboards warning “Accident Ahead, Expect Delays” placed a few miles before the accident to alert motorists.

6. Traffic engineer updates freeway message boards in both directions to read: “Accident Ahead, Expect Delay, Use Alternate Route.”

7. Caltrans computer relays accident information to affected city-operated traffic management centers in Santa Ana, Anaheim and Irvine. Their computers devise alternate routes and information is posted on message boards along affected city streets. Police often direct traffic. Traffic centers reprogram signals to handle increased traffic flows.

8. Caltrans computer transmits data to nearby districts and to Sacramento center, which puts it on California Highway Information Network, a toll-free number with updated traffic information. Caltrans Internet map is updated every minute. Traffic engineer also sends information about accident to media over news wire. (1) (Truck accident scene and traffic jam.) (2) Inductive loop detectors Loops of wire embedded in freeway and linked electronically to Caltrans computer. Cars trigger responses, and traffic volume is recorded. Loops are present in 1,249 Southern California freeway miles. (6) Changeable message boards Fixed, overhead signs ahead of major freeway interchanges are linked to Caltrans computer so traffic engineer can change messages from control center; 169 in Southern California. (5) Mobile message boards Mounted on trailers or atop Caltrans trucks, they are used to warn approaching traffic of trouble; 75 in Southern California. (3) Closed-circuit TV Traffic engineers can scan or focus close-up by remote control. Engineer can activate electronic wipers to clear lens; 139 in Southern California. Three cameras operated by Irvine city traffic center and linked to Caltrans District 12 center on high-rise buildings, providing panoramic views of San Diego Freeway and most of Irvine’s major streets. (4) Call box: Telephone link to CHP dispatch; 10,850 in Southern California. (BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Caltrans District 12

Advanced Transportation Management Center

Hours: 24 hours daily

Location: 2501 Pullman St., Santa Ana

Employees: 20 Caltrans and CHP personnel

Size: 6,000 square feet

Earthquake monitoring: Receives seismic data directly from Caltech.

Caltrans home page: Internet address: https://www.dot.ca.gov/ for Caltrans traffic conditions map, updated every minute.

California Highway Information Network: (800) 427-7623 for recorded freeway conditions statewide; updated every half-hour.

Saving Lives and Money Response time Without traffic management system: 30-45 minutes With traffic management system: 10-15 minutes Money saved In Orange County alone, sitting in traffic costs businesses and individuals an estimated $15million per year in lost productivity and income. Hours delayed each year: Without traffic management center: 40 million hours costing $15 million per year. With traffic management center: TK

* Source: Caltrans District 12

* Researched by JANICE L. JONES/Los Angeles Times