1. thinkinghighways.com30 Vol 9 No 3 North America
OPINION PIECE ITS legacy
To get ITS systems where they are today required a lot of effort
that is worthy of recognition, but it is just as worthy to not cling
too much to the past, says David E Pickeral
Sacred relics
N
ot long ago on my travels I happened to walk by the
showroom of a classic car store and spotted a 1977
Pontiac Grand Prix. I had owned one of these for
eight years in my late teens and early 20s as a student and
then Naval Officer. It had been the top of the line, the SJ, with
the high-performance engine package, power sunroof, sport
wheels and premium 8-track cartridge sound system with a
built-in citizens band (CB) radio, all state-of-the-art for its
day. It was also the last of several decades of ‘bigger is better’
North American automobiles, before our first energy crisis
finally brought the first dose of the reality that much of the
rest of the world had been dealing with for decades.
In 1991 as I made plans to leave the Navy in San Diego
for graduate school back East, I finally had to give up the
nearly 14-year-old Pontiac, by then quite worn out mechani-
cally and suffering from rusting pierside for months on end
while I was at sea, surviving as it did a couple of ignominious
hit-and-run collisions with shipyard vehicles. I briefly con-
sidered having the vehicle restored as I had a shipmate with a
cousin in nearby Tijuana who did that sort of thing, but after
agonizing deliberation opted to trade in the GP and seek out
a more sensible and modern transportation, a Mazda RX-7.
So here, more than 20 years later, appeared the chance to
recapture a bit of pristine, low-mileage ‘big iron’ glory with
all the ‘numbers’ matching up.
I quickly realized that the GP would have to be kept out-
side on the driveway (or on the street) because at 212.7” (5.4
meters) it was far too long to pull into the garage and still
be able to close the door. Most significantly, the massive 6.6
liter engine averaged something like 12 mpg, making it both
environmentally and economically inconsistent with the 21st
Century.
So, I took a pass on the “retro ride” and walked on, but
this experience got me thinking about how all of us, not just
as transportation professionals but as human beings, can get
attached to the past in a way that defies practical reality. How
guilty are we, at times, of wanting to hold onto ‘sacred relics?’
Like the ’77 GP, the original ITS technology that was devel-
oped over the past several years was exceptional in its day
and much of that equipment, remaining in service today, will
continue to provide good service for years to come; just as I
am sure that classic GP will provide a good driving experi-
ence for some lucky driver with more garage space and time
than I have for an extra car.
However, whether through replacement or restoration
and enhancement to extend its life cycle, it is essential that
our ‘daily driver’, our mainstream ITS infrastructure, be kept
as current as possible, as budgets allow. The foundation in
achieving this lies, fundamentally, in the policies of govern-
ment and industry to support innovation and implementa-
tion. The discussion could not be more relevant than in the
context of the 21st ITS World Congress in Detroit-Windsor.

2. thinkinghighways.com 31North America Vol 9 No 3
ITS legacy
“The original ITS technology that was developed over the last couple
of decades was exceptional in its day - much of that equipment
remains in service today and will continue to provide good service for
years to come”
Indeed this latest North American ITS WC represents prob-
ably the most critical opportunity in almost a decade in
terms of the shift in and indeed towards smarter transporta-
tion thinking.
At another US-based ITS World Congress, the 12th in San
Francisco in November 2005, we likewise saw a significant
shift in public policy on top of fast-emerging technology with
the enactment of SAFETEA-LU1
. Far more than its predeces-
sors, TEA-212
and ISTEA3
, which were innovative enough
in their own right as evolutions of what had been for dec-
ades prior a largely carbon-copy program to fund ongoing
Interstate construction and other highway improvements,
SAFETEA-LU represented a vastly different philosophy in
funding and encouraging transportation innovation, and in
accounting for the promise to infuse ICT in all segments of
the value chain. Though the “dot com” boom and bust had
by then already occurred, few in the industry doubted that
from the back office to the roadside to the vehicles them-
selves great change was afoot, and the stage had been set.
During the years leading up to San Francisco the ITS com-
munity had been busy, as many of us will recall, on several
fronts. As a then practicing attorney and member (and later
Chair) of the Federal Bar Association Committee on Inter-
modal Transportation, during that time I worked to incorpo-
rate advanced ICT to allow for seamless, paperless transfers
of passengers and freight between modes, and to incorpo-
rate emerging driver fatigue monitoring technology into the
ongoing revision of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Admin-
istration (FMCSA) Hours of Service (HOS) regulations revi-
sion for commercial vehicles.4
Through the Federal Communications Bar Association
(FCBA) as well as proceedings before the Federal Commu-
nications Commission (FCC) for individual clients I helped
advocate for the allocation by the Commission of what
became 75 MHz of the 5.9 spectrum band for dedicated
NOTE
1 Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU)
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/safetealu/
2 The Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21)
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/tea21/
3 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA)
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/public_involvement/archive/legislation/istea.cfm
4 http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-of-service
What are the dangers of
becoming too attached to
the past? The 1977 Pontiac
Grand Prix was a great
car - but rather of its time

3. thinkinghighways.com32 Vol 9 No 3 North America
OPINION PIECE ITS legacy
short range communications (DSRC). Perhaps most impor-
tantly through the former IVHS/ITS-A5
Legal Issues Com-
mittee we worked, in the wake of the demise of the Intelligent
Vehicle Highway Systems Act of 19916
, to directly advise
Congress through the Federal Advisory Committee Act on
the need to supplant Interstate-era lane-mile metrics facili-
tating the turning of spades and the pouring of concrete with
more modern performance measures based on the efficiency
and effectiveness ITS could provide above and beyond that.
These efforts and the efforts of countless others paid off. In
essence San Francisco represented the transition of ITS from
an academic and research environment into the conscious-
ness and planning process of the entire transportation indus-
try and the government regulators that oversee and fund it.
Now as the world prepares to come to Detroit the current
successor to SAFETEA-LU, MAP-217
has (at this writing in
early August) just been temporarily extended. Its successor
and other issues such as the Highway Trust Fund, various
new types of road user charging schemes (distance, miles,
time, variable, congestion, etc.) and the implementation of
Connected Vehicles are coming toward a resolution, and not
just among politicians, practitioners, academics and engi-
neers (or combinations thereof).
From a technological perspective, the idea of the “Infor-
mation Superhighway” so prevalent nine years ago has now
been supplanted by a more focused vision: much of the dig-
ital content will be hosted in the cloud versus in a plethora
of roadside cabinets and devices. Data once held in separate
proprietary stovepipes like ATMS, EFC, ETC or CCTV sys-
tems will be accessible through open standards and inte-
grated, allowing a level of access and ubiquity unimaginable
even a few years ago.
From a time when mobile data had been little more than
sending email via BlackBerry, more types of mobile broad-
band devices within and beyond vehicles are being be
deployed to make the wired and wireless ecosystems much
more seamless. Social networks are allowing transportation
community members to connect as never before, but even
more importantly through applications like Waze and Uber,
the public are becoming active participants, even practition-
ers, in the evolution of transport networks.
Most importantly, the application of analytics to all of this
data, wherever located, will increasingly yield not only a
wealth of new information, but the ability to predict in better
than real time, respond to incidents before they even occur,
“In essence the 2005 San Francisco ITS World Congress represented
the transition of ITS from an academic and research environment into
the consciousness and planning process of the entire transportation
industry and the government regulators that oversee and fund it”
NOTE
5 Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS-A),
founded originally in 1991 as Intelligent Vehicle Highway
Systems (IVHS) America
6 https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/102/hr2835
7 Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21)
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/map21/
There can be no room for
nostalgia in a 21st Century
transportation environment

4. thinkinghighways.com 33North America Vol 9 No 3
ITS legacy
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ITC_ITS Thinking Highways 190x117.indd 1 8/12/14 2:08 PM
and tailor content to the specific and immediate needs of
each individual end user in the system.
The 2014 ITS World Congress, I would go so far to sug-
gest, will mark the transition of the ITS and Telematics co-
industries into the awareness of the public at large in terms
of where they will expect investments and improvements to
be made, from the cars they buy to the roadways they drive
them on, to the places they park (and charge) them, as well as
across many other modes from cycling to carsharing to sub-
ways. In such a visible transition there can bee no room for
sentiment or nostalgia. Just as a large segment of the popula-
tion no longer relates to hood ornaments and chrome bump-
ers, so too will they tend to measure speed, reliability and
capacity as much in digital terms as they will in mechanical,
not really separating the two in evaluating the entire machine
as a ‘mash-up’ of different but utterly inseparable technology.
Alongside this enlightened user community will come a
new wave of investors, both public and private and at times
both, who will expect that not only will everything work, but
do so in a way that ensures return on investment. The indus-
try must be ready, and I optimistically expect we will be as
long as we help each other remember to keep moving past
that showroom window.
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 David Pickeral is Transportation Sector Lead for the
IBM Industry Smarter Solutions Team
 depicker@us.ibm.com
 www.linkedin.com/in/pickeral
“Social networks are allowing transportation community members to
connect as never before – through applications like Waze and Uber,
the public are becoming active participants, even practitioners, in the
evolution of transport networks”