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Trucking’s Knight In High-Tech Armor

As head of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America,former ATA exec. John Collins is turning the agency’s attention to trucks.

John Bendel
Senior Editor

How many transponders will fit on the windshield of a truck?
     Transponders, small radio transmitters and receivers often called tags, are proliferating rapidly. Tomorrow’s truck may require one for company use, another for weigh-station bypass and more for tollroads, bridges, tunnels and whatever pay-by-the-mile schemes future government agencies might dream up. If technology develops on its current course, the truck driver of the future may not be able to see through them all.
     But that won’t happen if John Collins has anything to say about it, and in his new role as president of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America, he has a lot to say.Last year Collins left his job as vice president of government affairs for the American Trucking Assns., where he had represented trucking interests on Capitol Hill for 10 years. In May 1998, he was named president of ITSA. True to his background, Collins says he plans to turn considerably more attention to what the ITSA calls commercial vehicle operations (CVO), the largest segment of which is trucking.
     “We’re a trade association of roughly $10 million a year with a staff of 48,” Collins told HDT. “We are based in Washington, DC, but we also have 20 state chapters. We have a little over 1,200 national and state chapter members.”
     ITSA members include national and state Department of Transportation officials, vehicle manufacturers, traffic control system providers and technology giants like Motorola, Qualcomm and IBM. ITSA helps DOT spend money on numerous experiments and demonstration programs, some of which have lived on. For example, PrePass, the weigh-station bypass system, was originally launched with ITSA support. The public/private partnership is run by Heavy Vehicle Electronic License Plate Inc., of Phoenix, AZ. PrePass now operates in 10 states and is expanding.
     ITSA also brings together diverse elements to develop standards for the benefit of all, just the kind of standards needed to prevent tag proliferation.
     Collins likened the current tags with bar code tracking in the grocery business:“Imagine what it would be like ... if the checkout clerk had to look at the package and say, ‘Okay, this is a cereal box; I’ve got to hold it up to this laser scanner. And this is a can of soup; I have to hold it up to this other proprietary scanner.’ That’s exactly where we are right now in this transponder business.
     “The people who are really the moving forces in these electronic tags [are] the people who build them and the major toll authorities. One toll authority, the MTA Bridge and Tunnel Authority, has issued 2 million tags. All the CVO tags — I think there are about 75,000 — are dwarfed by one system of bridges in New York City.”
     That’s one reason ITSA is sponsoring the Blue Ribbon Panel on Electronic Commerce, a meeting of systems integrators — “the people who actually design the systems,” said Collins. This September in Washington, “they’ll sit down and say, okay, this is what the windshield looks like, folks.”

TRUCKING IS READY
     But tags are just one issue in the CVO field. And even with its new, higher priority, CVO remains just one area of concern for ITSA.
     “Because the trucking community has been slow to come to the ITS world,” Collins explained, “the biggest focus here was on Detroit and automobiles.”
     But Collins’ experience tells him the commercial sector is in a much better position to experiment with and adopt the technologies ITSA sponsors and is attempting to coordinate.“The auto industry thinks in such large increments. If they want to install a tag in a car, what they want to do is make it a standard item in a million cars,” Collins explained.
     A truck assembly line is very different, he said.
     “You’ve got different engines on the same assembly line, different transmissions, different tires, different seats, different paint schemes. There is such a degree of customization that it really is a terrific opportunity to try some of these ITS technologies.”
     According to Collins, those technologies will address both efficiency and safety.
     Safety, said Collins, “is doing things like routing people around accidents so trucks and cars don’t come over the hill and find a stopped line of traffic in front of them, creating a second round of accidents.” It also includes devices, such as alertness monitors for measuring driver fatigue.

TWO PATHS TO EFFICIENCY
     Collins sees ITSA approaching efficiency in two ways.
     “The first is to try to work with the commercial community to set up tagging systems, so the logistics chain can track the freight as it moves from one end to the other, whether it’s all by truck or an intermodal movement,” he said.
     “The bottom-line advantage for the trucker is ... to be able to give the customer the kind of continuous tracking that right now the package delivery people and some of the LTL folks are doing. There are a scattering of high-end truckload guys who’ve got various capabilities, but it’s still different people doing different things with a lot of unique systems.
     “What we’re trying to do is move people toward an international standard, so that tags put on in Hamburg can be used by everybody else along the line.”
     The second approach involves highways themselves.
     “We need to have cameras that can identify that there’s an accident ahead ... and variable message signs that tell the trucker who doesn’t have a radio that he ought to get off here because the bridge is up,” he said.
     Collins cited NAVIGATOR, the Georgia DOT’s advanced traffic control system around Atlanta.
     “That was built by the DOT as an example of how you can use intelligent transportation systems to get people where they’re going. It’s got cameras that look out over the normal congestion spots. It’s got variable messages that tell you in real time how long it’s going to take to get to various exits.”
     If you know the highways, he explained, that kind of information allows you to chose alternate routes around bottlenecks, relieving congestion where it is most severe.
     (You can see the system operate at the Georgia NAVIGATOR web site, where you can click at points on a map and read the message on a particular variable sign or see the view from a traffic camera, www. georgia-traveler.com/traffic.)
     Perhaps more important than individual projects, however, is ITSA’s role in DOT regulation.
     “We’re used as a federal advisory committee by the USDOT,” said Collins. “That means when they get to the rulemaking stage, they have to shut everybody else out of the room and see what they have to say in formal submissions. As an advisory committee, we can have back-and-forth discussions with DOT and work to develop consensus positions.”
     When different, often competing interests take strong advocacy positions on regulatory issues, DOT sometimes faces a problem, Collins explained.
     “The truth is DOT has a difficult time cutting through these positions of strong advocacy and developing positions that represent a win for everybody — not a total win for anyone, but elements of a win for everyone,” he said. “That’s what ITSA can do.”
     And on paper at least, Collins is just the right man for the job. Before joining ATA, it turns out, Collins spent 16 years at DOT.

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