WASHINGTON – Traffic jams and tie-ups cost Americans about 38 hours a year in wasted time, but data analysis, autonomous cars and new digital transportation tools are in the works to make travel more efficient and less frustrating, experts told a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday.
The Subcommittee on Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure hearing was looking for ways businesses and government can best utilize new technologies to increase the efficiency of transportation.
The Texas A&M Transportation Institute said traffic delays cause an average of 38 hours wait time per year per person and cost $121 billion due to wasted time and fuel.
Inefficiency also exists in vehicle use. “There’s a reason why the leading global Internet companies are looking at connected and autonomous vehicles as they understand the issues are similar to the decentralization that created the Internet many decades ago,” said Robert Edelstein, senior vice president of AECOM, an engineering design firm.
Edelstein said cars sit in parking lots or garages outside of peak driving hours, which is inefficient. Data analysis and decentralized approaches to car use could help solve the problem.
Jordan Kass, president of managed services for C.H. Robinson, a company that provides freight transportation and other logistics services to businesses, said new technologies have helped his firm reduce transportation inefficiencies.
“Data and technology is a big driver of change in our businesses,” said Kass. He said C.H. Robinson is giving apps to its drivers to speed their workflow. New Technology and automation allows his firm to gain “massive amounts of information quickly and accurately around the world.”
Intel Corp. Senior Vice President Doug Davis told the subcommittee that as the Internet of Things – where devices are all connected digitally and can share data – grows, it needs to be shared and open globally.
“Think forward around the Internet of Things. One of our challenges of scale is to have this global optimization, because we’re see these technologies needed to create connectivity between things and the dataset in our cloud,” said Davis. “That’s why we are advocating an open platform to allow flexibility to break down some of those silos.”