Japjeev Kohli is Vice President of Technology at Transurban North America.
First responders carry the weight of tremendously challenging roles, facing high-stress situations daily and frequently encountering individuals on the worst days of their lives. Whether providing critical care in an ambulance or ensuring community safety on patrol, those on the front lines require every available tool to improve safety—especially when it comes to navigating the roads.
Regrettably, recent headlines have highlighted incidents involving self-driving vehicles causing casualties and chaos on roadways. Autonomous vehicles hitting pedestrians, including an incident in which a woman was tragically killed in San Francisco, introduce additional complexity and challenges to the already demanding work of first responders—leading to calls for investigations amid safety concerns.
A Safe Environment
This dynamic is particularly concerning because the expectation was that the advent of autonomous driving would bring about safety benefits rather than risks. The convenience of autonomous driving should ideally be accompanied by enhanced safety. That’s where smart roads play a crucial role: a technology-intensive infrastructure designed to maintain constant communication with autonomous vehicles. The aim is to assist these vehicles in navigating a multitude of roadway situations safely and efficiently.
Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs), in collaboration with smart roads, have the potential to ease the burden of first responders by reducing the overall number of accidents and roadway fatalities. This improvement extends beyond self-driving vehicles, benefiting the entire road transportation ecosystem. When a car is equipped to anticipate conditions beyond the scope of a human driver or standard sensors, it can proactively plan to navigate around hazards such as an active construction zone, debris on the highway or a pedestrian in a crosswalk. Moreover, actively monitored smart roads can provide real-time alerts to first responders in critical situations, enhancing public safety and emergency management. This swift notification system is particularly valuable in time-sensitive scenarios, allowing first responders to react promptly and effectively.
Beyond safety considerations, CAVs offer additional support to first responders in many other ways—through data and technology. Throughout a recent study and demonstration of a CAV on Transurban’s 395 Express Lanes, my Transurban team and our partners collaborated with law enforcement agencies from around the country, who raised a host of good questions.
1. Can CAVs help us determine what happened in a roadway accident?
2. How should a police officer interact with a CAV and no driver?
3. Will a CAV recognize a police car and respond appropriately?
Within the federal grant project, the significance of incorporating input from first responders during the development and implementation of CAV technologies proved to be crucial—making sure those who dedicate themselves day in and day out to ensure our safety have the tools they need to do so as self-driving vehicles are becoming more and more prevalent.
Driving Forward: Work To Come
Armed with this knowledge, governments and roadway operators must take proactive measures to enhance the safety of autonomous driving for the general public and streamline the response process for first responders.
To achieve this, we must build infrastructure that focuses on:
• Augmenting CAVs for safe operation.
• Providing critical information to first responders.
• Enabling timely alerts for first responders.
To address these needs, we need to deploy roadside technology capable of effectively discerning this information in real time. Numerous states, counties and cities across the country have already deployed this technology. This technology ranges from cameras layered with machine vision, traffic detectors giving lane-by-lane speed, volume and headway information, and lane control signs to digitally cordon off a part of the roadway. By deploying and integrating these technologies into our roadside infrastructure, we can create an environment where real-time information is readily available, contributing to safer autonomous driving and providing first responders with the tools they need to navigate and respond effectively to incidents on the road.
Smart roads offer capabilities beyond those associated with CAVs: they play a crucial role in more effectively managing incidents, reducing secondary crashes, alleviating congestion and preserving lives and property. The integration of infrastructure and technology can enable first responders to know how fast the cars were traveling at the time of the accident, how many passengers there were, the extent of the damage to the vehicles and what debris was present on the road.
The second piece of the puzzle is the creation of the necessary back-end software systems to aggregate, analyze and contextualize the gathered information. This includes the crucial capability to aggregate data from diverse sources, whether they be crowdsourced, privately owned or publicly accessible.
The final piece is the creation of the essential digital bridge between the infrastructure and the vehicles. The benefits derived from the information generated by both vehicles and infrastructure can only be fully realized when there is a timely and reliable communication system in place.
The greatest service we can render to first responders in the realm of transportation is to accelerate the adoption of CAVs. We should never lose sight of the fact that CAVs will ultimately reduce the number of accidents and the need for traffic stops. Ultimately, they will alleviate the immense workload of first responders, which is currently unsustainable. To genuinely support first responders, we must act swiftly and make substantial investments to facilitate everything CAVs need to become a reality. With investment from governments and collaborative partnerships with private infrastructure experts, we can build infrastructure that can provide critical data to CAVs and set aside so CAVs can not only communicate with the roadway but also with one another.
First responders play some of the most meaningful roles in America, yet their jobs are also amongst the most challenging. We all depend on first responders to keep us safe on the road (and elsewhere), and the significant strain they face is a collective concern for all of us. The next significant advancement in transportation must become a game-changer for them as well. Let’s commit to making the necessary investments to ensure that CAVs not only transform transportation but also work seamlessly to support and enhance the vital work of our first responders.
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