Cars collect troves of data about traffic and road hazards. Should they share it?

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The secret to avoiding red lights during rush hour in Utah’s largest city may be as simple as following a bus.

Transportation officials have spent the past few years perfecting a system in which radio transmitters inside commuter buses talk directly to traffic lights in the Salt Lake City area, requesting a few extra seconds of green light as they approach.

Congestion on these smart streets has become noticeably smoother, but this is just a small preview of the high-tech upgrades that may soon be coming to roads across Utah and eventually across the United States.

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Thanks to a $20 million federal grant and an ambitious call to “Connect the West,” the goal is to ensure that every vehicle in Utah, as well as neighboring Colorado and Wyoming, can communicate with each other and with roadside infrastructure about congestion, accidents, road hazards and weather conditions.

With this knowledge, drivers can immediately know when to take another route, bypassing the need to manually send someone an alert to an electronic street sign or mobile map apps.

“A car can tell us a lot about what’s happening on the road,” says Blaine Leonard, a transportation technology engineer with the Utah Department of Transportation. “Maybe the car was braking hard, the windshield wipers were on, or the wheels were slipping. The car is anonymously transmitting this data to us 10 times a second, giving us a constant stream of information.”

When cars transmit information in real time to other cars and various sensors scattered along and above the road, the technology is widely known as “vehicle-to-everything,” or V2X. Last month, the U.S. Department of Transportation unveiled a national blueprint for how state and local governments and private companies can deploy the various V2X projects already underway to make sure everyone is on the same page.

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The overall goal is global: to significantly reduce road deaths and serious injuries, which have recently risen to historic levels.

A 2016 analysis by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded that V2X technology could help. The study found that implementing just two of the oldest vehicle-to-everything apps nationwide would prevent between 439,000 and 615,000 crashes and save between 987 and 1,366 lives.

Dan Langenkamp has been pushing for improved road safety since his wife, Sarah Langenkamp, ​​a U.S. diplomat, was killed by a truck while riding a bicycle in Maryland in 2022. Langenkamp joined officials at the press conference to announce the car-for-everything scheme, urging governments across the U.S. to roll out the technology as widely and quickly as possible.

“How can we as government officials, as manufacturers, as Americans not push this technology forward as quickly as we can, knowing that we have the ability to save ourselves from this catastrophe, this crisis on our roads?” he said.

Much of the public resistance has been related to privacy. Although the V2X rollout plan is committed to protecting personal information, some privacy advocates remain skeptical.

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Critics say that while the system may not track specific vehicles, it is able to collect enough identifying characteristics — even seemingly innocuous things like tire pressure levels — that it wouldn’t take much work to figure out who is behind the wheel and where they are going.

“Once you have enough unique information, you can reasonably say that the car driving down this street at this time that has this weight class probably belongs to the mayor,” said Cliff Brown, associate director of technology, policy and research at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for digital privacy.

The federal plan says the nation’s 75 largest metropolitan areas should aim to have at least 25 percent of their signalized intersections equipped with the technology by 2028, with higher milestones in subsequent years. Thanks to its fast start, Salt Lake City has already surpassed 20 percent.

Of course, updating the signals is the relatively easy part. The most important data comes from the cars themselves. While most new cars have connected features, they don’t all work the same way.

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Before implementing the Connect the West plan, Utah officials tested what they called the nation’s first radio-based connected vehicle technology, using only data provided by vehicles like buses and snow plows. One early pilot program successfully upgraded a bus lane on a busy stretch of Redwood Road, and it wasn’t just bus riders who noticed the difference.

“Everything they do is paying off,” said Jenny Duenas, assistant director of the nearby Panda Day Care Center, where 80 children ranging in age from 6 weeks to 12 years old are enrolled. “We haven’t had traffic in a while. We have to move our kids out of here, so when things are a little bit freer, it’s a lot easier to get out of the day care.”

Most of the changes may go unnoticed by drivers, said Casey Brock, bus communications supervisor for the Utah Transportation Authority. But even cutting a few seconds off a bus route can significantly reduce congestion while improving safety, he said.

“From a passenger’s perspective, it might be, ‘Oh, it was a good day in terms of traffic,’” Brook said. “They don’t necessarily know all the mechanisms that go on behind the scenes.”

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This summer, Michigan opened a planned 3-mile (4.8-kilometer) connected and automated vehicle corridor on Interstate 94 between Ann Arbor and Detroit. The pilot project features digital infrastructure, including sensors and cameras mounted on poles along the highway, that will help drivers prepare for traffic slowdowns by sending notifications about things like debris and stopped vehicles.

Similar technology is being used in a smart freight corridor around Austin, Texas, which aims to inform truck drivers of road conditions and eventually meet the needs of self-driving trucks.

Officials hope the technology will not only boost the state’s massive trucking industry but also help reverse a disturbing trend that has spanned more than two decades, said Darran Anderson, director of strategy and innovation for the Texas Department of Transportation. The last day without a crash in Texas was Nov. 7, 2000.

Cavno, a subsidiary of Washington, D.C.-based Alphabet Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, funded the Michigan project and was awarded the contract to develop the project in Texas. The company has set a goal of becoming a leader in smart road technology.

Chris Armstrong, vice president of product at Cavno, describes V2X as a “digital seatbelt for the car,” but says it will only work if cars and roadside infrastructure can communicate seamlessly with each other.

“Instead of speaking 50 different languages, we would like overnight to all speak the same language,” he added.

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