Who Cares About Transportation?

I know that every member of IBTTA cares deeply about transportation and so do I. I’m concerned, however, that achieving major reform of transportation policy and funding in the US will continue to be a long, uphill battle. This impression was reinforced this week by the lack of hard news reporting on an important policy discussion on transportation.

In the June 27 edition of Innovation NewsBriefs, Ken Orski presents a comprehensive analysis of the events surrounding this week’s release of the Surface Transportation Authorization Act of 2009 (STAA 2009).

In an essay called “The Week that Changed the Game Plan,” Ken looks at the jockeying that’s going on between the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, the Senate, and the Obama administration over the merits of having an 18-month extension of the current transportation law versus working to enact a new law by September 30, 2009. Many other media outlets looked at the same issues. And that is a good thing!

Now for the bad news. Also in the latest Innovation NewsBriefs, Ken reports on a June 24 National Press Club event featuring the Building America’s Future coalition, a joint initiative founded by Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In Ken’s words, the coalition “mounted an impressive day-long show of advocacy and public education focused on creative ways to solve the infrastructure deficit problem.”

From my perspective, this is one of the most critical issues facing America. Certainly, the speakers who participated in the event think it's important on a mammoth scale. Unfortunately, the media did not think it was very important. More on that later.

Major speakers in the morning session of the event included Governor Rendell, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), sponsor of the bill to create a National Infrastructure Development Bank (H.R. 2521) and Bernard Schwartz, a long-time proponent of the national infrastructure bank. Other presenters included two of the bill’s co-sponsors, Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN).

According the Ken, “the afternoon discussion turned to the more general question of how to advance a new national vision for infrastructure investment. A panel consisting of Governor Ed Rendell, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt held the audience’s attention for over an hour.” He described the question and answer session as “a truly extraordinary display of eloquence, passion and intellectual bravura.”

The DC Streets Blog also had a short article about the event.

With such a star-studded cast of presenters – Gov. Rendell, Mayor Bloomberg, Former Speaker Gingrich, and Former Leader Gephardt – I would have thought this event would draw strong media attention. Unfortunately, no other media outlets covered the event. If they did, they haven't published their dispatches on the worldwide web. So, the issue that is so important to us in the tolling industry is a very weak draw not only for national media but also the transportation trade press.

So, to repeat, in the absence of media attention and strong grassroots interest in these issues, achieving major reform of transportation policy and funding in the US will continue to be a long, uphill battle.

-- Pat Jones

Connection, Not Control (Part 2)

In today’s Washington Post, Sally Jenkins waxes poetic about Tiger Woods’ struggle for control in golf’s rain-soaked US Open at Bethpage Black in New York.

“That Woods hates disarray has always been obvious from his preppy-perfect appearance,” she says. “You can see it in the neatness of his vests and slacks. He is a self-admitted control freak who even irons his new shirts, fresh out of the bag, so they crease just right. Woods wins major championships with the same meticulousness; he is a fanatic for preparation and predictability, a man who likes to know the answers in advance. He sets his mind on a specific number that is most likely to win, and shoots it. The mud upsets his calculations. He doesn't like guesswork.”

After describing a dozen instances in which Tiger Woods remarked on the unpredictable influence of mud during various golf events, she considers the effect of mud on the course of world history.

“Woods is hardly the first titan to struggle in the mire” Jenkins writes. “Perhaps he could take some lessons from the past. According to Mud: A Military History by C.E. Wood, mud has been a decisive factor in world history. Napoleon postponed his attack at Waterloo to allow the mud to dry, and got beat by Wellington. In November 1942, Russian mud stymied the Germans, who could not advance until the temperature dropped low enough to freeze the mud. Then again, those results are hardly encouraging for a man seeking world domination. Maybe the best way for Woods to play the mud ball is to quit worrying about it so much. Simply ignore it. Like the rest of us.”

Woods may be struggling to control the mud. But this is a temporary phenomenon. After all, Tiger has a greater knack for connecting with the ball than perhaps any person in the history of golf. That connection will likely help him earn many more victories.

-- Pat Jones

Safety is Not One Big Thing…

Wear steel tipped boots with rubberized soles. Lift with your legs and not your back or arms. Wear a reflective safety vest when working beside traffic. Look both ways before crossing the street. Wear a helmet. Don’t step out of a moving vehicle. Keep three points of contact when climbing a ladder. Don’t leave tools lying around; put them away.

Safety is not one big thing…it’s a lot of little things. They all add up. In many cases, it’s simple common sense. Things we learned when we were children.

When it comes to operating and maintaining major modern highway, bridge and tunnel facilities, safety is a LOT of little things – hundreds, even thousands of little things – that add up to many BIG things. This is what IBTTA’s summit on Incident Management, Safety and Security July 19-21 in Denver is all about.

More than twenty years ago, I listened to a radio program in which the host was interviewing U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski. This was during the age of arbitrage, leveraged buyouts, and corporate takeovers. When it was fashionable to flip an ailing company into a quick pile of cash. The radio host asked calmly, “What’s going on? Why are all of these takeovers happening now?” I will never forget Senator Mikulski’s response: “We have lost the ability to do the ordinary with enthusiasm,” she said. “Everyone wants to buy an airline, but nobody wants to maintain the planes. Everyone wants to cut the big deal, but nobody wants to do the hard work that follows.”

Doing the ordinary with enthusiasm is what incident management, safety and security are all about. Doing the ordinary with enthusiasm saves lives. Doing the ordinary with enthusiasm can help turn a potentially tragic situation – like a washed out bridge or downed power line – into a minor inconvenience that simply costs time but not lives.

On July 19-21, 2009, transportation experts from all over the world will come together to share their experiences on what it means to do the ordinary with enthusiasm. A recent comprehensive study demonstrates that toll facilities in the United States have a much lower fatality rate than do U.S. roads overall and lower fatality rates than both urban and rural interstate highways. The experts in Denver will share with you the practices they use to make toll facilities the safest roads around. Don’t miss it. Learn more about Denver 2009 here.

-- Pat Jones

Facing Reality on the Highway Trust Fund

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has written a cogent analysis of the current crisis in transportation funding in the June 18 posting to his official blog. Here’s an excerpt:

“Highways are built, repaired, and maintained with payments from the Highway Trust Fund. The Fund is replenished by revenue collected from motor fuel taxes when Americans buy gas. When Fund spending in a given period is more than the gas tax collected in the same period, the Fund declines. When the decline persists over months or years, the Fund runs out of money and limits the ability of the Federal government to help states.”

You cannot help but be impressed by the clarity of the Secretary’s words: the Highway Trust Fund is broke and the Federal government cannot help the states. Simple, stark, real. With this analysis from the highest level of the Department, one wonders why the Federal government does not get out of the way of states’ efforts to help themselves. Furthermore, it appears that Congress and the administration are unlikely to reach consensus or agreement on a national solution to this problem in the near term. What to do?

In its newly released report called Performance Driven: A New Vision for U.S. Transportation Policy, the Bipartisan Policy Center argues that “Federal policies and funding should assist states and local governments in developing sustainable funding sources including eliminating federal restrictions on road pricing, supporting efforts by states to implement direct user charges and expanding TIFIA credit support.” We agree.

The Bipartisan Policy Center report and those of the two congressional commissions that preceded it – the 2008 Policy and Revenue and Study Commission report and the 2009 Infrastructure Financing Commission report – are sounding a steady drumbeat of calls to reform the current system of funding surface transportation in the United States.

We cannot support a 21st century transportation system using 19th century techniques, mindsets, and policies. Toll operators around the world right now are successfully linking payment for the transportation system with use of the system, sending highly accurate price signals to users that encourage more efficient transportation use decisions. Technologies such as electronic toll collection and open road tolling allow these price signals to be sent in real time without stopping, without waiting, and without barriers. We strongly urge the United States Congress to heed the steady cadence of recommendations aimed at reforming the current system and removing the barriers that stand in the way of funding mechanisms that focus on performance and connect the use of the system with payment for that use.

-- Pat Jones

Connection, Not Control

In my wrap up remarks to the Summit on “The Future of Tolling: ORT and the Path to Interoperability” in Tampa, I identified “control” as one of the underlying themes. Many speakers and conference attendees expressed concern about how much (or how little) control they would have over their own future.

Here are just a few of the many control-oriented questions I heard during the Tampa conference. “If charging on the basis of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) becomes pervasive, what will happen to my toll agency? Will there even be a toll industry? The world seems to be moving rapidly to VMT charging; therefore, IBTTA needs to own this issue. What happens to my agency if the industry moves to a new standard for ETC equipment and systems? Will we still be able to use the equipment we have now, or will we be forced to move to a new platform? At my agency, will we continue to own the customer accounts? Or will someone else like the banks or the credit card companies gain control? Who controls the Alliance for Toll Interoperability (ATI)? What is IBTTA’s role in that?”

I mentioned the commencement address delivered by Paul Hawken to the class of 2009 at the University of Portland in which he urged his listeners to focus less on control and more on connection. He said to the graduates:

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force.

So, when I sat in our conference in Tampa and listened to people talk about control and ownership and force, what I heard was fear. Fear of change, fear of the unfamiliar, fear of being swept away by an idea or practice that was “not invented here.” In other words, if somebody else thought of it, I don’t want any part of it.

This revulsion to the unfamiliar is perhaps an evolutionary development. It was (and perhaps still is) a survival mechanism. If I don’t know you, I stay away from you (and your ideas) because you could be a danger to me and my survival. I think what Paul Hawken suggests, however, is that our survival depends on connection. Our survival and our prosperity depend on connecting and combining a diverse set of people, ideas, practices, and beliefs for the betterment of humanity. I think we in the toll industry can profit from Hawken’s ideas in our quest to promote the concept of tolling AND find the path to interoperability.

While all of this was swimming in my head today, I heard on the radio a commentary by Daniel Schorr in which he described how the Internet is helping to advance freedom in Iran. Here’s a brief excerpt:

The "Twitter Revolution," some call it. In Iran, tyranny has run afoul of technology in the form of the Internet, turning a protest into a movement. Iran has now become the latest arena in the struggle for control in cyberspace. The Internet has effectively defeated the regime's efforts to isolate marchers from each other and from the outside world. The Internet has become a veritable underground social network. A dedicated Twitter account for supporters of challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi claims to have more than 11,000 followers. The Twitter company in San Francisco expresses pride that it is playing an important part in Iran as a communications tool.

So, all over the world we see that connection, not control, is the wave of the future. Connection, not control is the way in which humanity is continuing to evolve and strive for freedom. Just as our small experiment in Twitter at the Tampa meeting helped to connect attendees in four separate breakout sessions in real time, so Twitter is nurturing the aspirations for connectedness among the people in Iran. I hope that our own efforts at connection (not control) will help us find the promised land of interoperability in the toll industry.

-- Pat Jones

How Can Smart Technology Drive Performance?

National Journal’s expert blog this week posed the question, How Can Smart Technology Drive Performance? The more detailed question is this: “There is a growing consensus among experts that our transportation system must put far greater emphasis on performance and results (and far less on funding equity and earmarks) to regain the public's trust and willingness to pay for it. What role can technology play in measuring and improving the system's performance, and how can the federal government best encourage the adoption of effective technological solutions to the country's transportation problems? What role should the private sector play?”

I began my response by suggesting that if we think of “technology” in the broadest sense to include not simply devices and electronic systems that can be manufactured, but also processes and human behaviors that will be encouraged through better policies, then a very powerful technology we should implement is road pricing and tolling.

You can read my response and those of other experts here.

-- Pat Jones

"Missing the Boat"

The whispered sentiment in hallways and backrooms at the ORT/Interoperability Summit in Tampa this week is that IBTTA has missed the boat on interoperability since 1990...or before.

Indeed, the notion that we missed the boat is perhaps the most relentlessly whispered sentiment at any IBTTA meeting I have ever attended. To paraphrase the bible, "where two or three toll professionals are gathered, there is regret among them."

Hmm. If we "missed the boat," how could IBTTA have "gotten on the boat" back in 1990 or in any year since then? Would getting on the boat have meant assembling all of the smartest minds in the toll industry in one room to come up with THE SOLUTION for interoperability once and for all? Should the industry have selected the one and only technology solution that everyone would use so that we would never struggle with having different jurisdictions embracing different, incompatible technologies? Should we have forced everyone to adopt the technology and systems of VENDOR A (at the expense of VENDORS B, C, D, E...) so that we could enjoy the benefits of interoperable all electronic tolling and multilane free flow everywhere in North America...or dare I say, the world?

Should we have forced the entire industry to embrace the next generation electronic toll collection performance specification that was developed by a working group of IBTTA in the early 2000s, and which was acknowledged, supported, and approved by the IBTTA Board of Directors as the smart way to go, but which individual agencies turned away from because (fill in the blank -- each agency had a different reason)?

It's an interesting mental exercise to consider what could have, should have, or might have been. However, the most important thing we can do is consider WHAT IS, here and now, and what we can do NOW to make the world (including interoperability) a better place. We cannot change the past. I repeat: we cannot change the past. We cannot change the decisions, actions, or lack of actions that IBTTA, the toll industry, all of its vendors and agencies made or didn't make in the past. We live here, today, on June 15, 2009. We think and live in the present. We can learn from the past. But we should not burden ourselves with it.

Let's embrace the possibility that a new day brings. Let's embrace the possibility that we can learn from the past and make even better decisions today than we made in the past. Let's embrace the possibility that our future will be more orderly and less chaotic than what the past, in our mind's eye, appears to have been.

-- Pat Jones

VMT and Interoperability

Recently I had the chance to listen in on a debate about the future of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) charging and the role that interoperability will play. In the context of the ORT and Interoperability Summit in Tampa, I thought you might enjoy reading portions of this debate. I’ve changed the names of the participants to protect their anonymity.

-- Pat Jones

Talker1: The concept of ubiquitous road pricing as proposed by the Infrastructure Financing Commission is both a potentially mortal threat to IBTTA as well as a huge opportunity. The threat is obvious. If road pricing is mandated by USDOT and every state needs to install a solution, then toll roads will be a minor part of the system without toll collection capability of their own, just receiving funding from the state government or they might just be incorporated into the state network, bondholder issues eventually resolved. Pretty dire.

On the other hand, toll roads can be in the vanguard of this trend by making themselves indispensable components and potential leaders of such a scheme. How to position for leadership is the key question.

One suggestion is to demonstrate the technology and its effectiveness. How accurate are various open road solutions? What are the best system designs?
How best to array cameras and detection? These and many more are the questions that will need to be answered but today even we can't answer them because neither the suppliers nor the users want to independently test the accuracy of ORT. So my suggestion is an IBTTA sponsored evaluation program that will publish test results as well as best practices.

Talker2: I agree fully with your opening sentence. There are a couple of challenges here. If ubiquitous tolling is adopted, our industry will look like two flat footed runners with two legs tied together trying to run in the Olympic 4 x 400 relay race!

By default the system for ubiquitous tolling would have to be primarily GPS based, and in North America we are not in that game. The one thin advantage we would have over the DOTs would be our general tolling experience.

If I was a betting man, I guess that Cordon Tolling will be applied to the larger cities and heavily used corridors. On this front, the question of efficient technology is important. But I think the bigger challenge is that we have managed to make interoperability so complicated and expensive. I think that if we could slay this particular dragon then our industry would be better positioned to lead the charge on at least phase one of the move "towards" ubiquitous tolling.

In short, I think whoever can deliver efficient and effective interoperability in the short term will be passed the baton – flat footed or not!

The two big problems we have are:
1. Not enough cars have transponders so we either go to electronic license plates or we charge a huge premium for video tolling.
2. We really need to get our act together on the low-cost/high-value "competitive" interoperability systems. I suspect that Visa and MasterCard do not operate 120 backroom operations across the country. Our industry should not have to do this either. Over the last 20 years, technology has dramatically changed the way we collect tolls. We as an industry have not done nearly as well at moving our business model forward. Technology is supposed to work for us, not the other way around. As an industry we should be much more focused on providing safe and efficient travel to our customers rather than "collecting tolls.”

So, to get back to your question about the technology demonstration, would this be somewhat like the shootout they ran in North Carolina? To me it feels a bit like doing a consumer evaluation report and I'm not sure if this is a roll we should play. Would we say have a conference where IBTTA and ASSHTO would do this jointly? I'm guessing that they are our audience.

Talker1: GPS tolling is very expensive and may have accuracy problems with location identification. So far only Germany has adopted it but in the US there is great interest in next generation toll tags because they can cover toll collection, in-vehicle services and active safety solutions

While there are many banks offering back office services, the diagram of how they interact under the surface is very complicated because the credit card networks were built on existing services, sort of like toll back offices

I also heard that AASHTO has started to talk about universal tolling. Worth a chat with them I would think. Bottom line is that all tolling expertise rests in our association. We can become part of the solution. Our problem is that even within IBTTA we are reluctant to honestly measure system performance, talk about leakage and think about standards. That's part of the discussion that I'd like to have.

Talker3: I was in Europe recently and would say that it is very premature to conclude that any ubiquitous road charging scheme in the U.S. will be based on GPS. Recent news suggests the U.S. military has dramatically cut funding for maintaining the public part of the GPS system and users are already starting to see degradation. Users in Europe, including toll systems, are looking into Galileo (E.U.) or GLONASS (Russia) as possible alternatives to GPS if the signal degradation continues. The E.U. is also actively pursuing 5.9 GHz VII systems, which include a tolling component.

I tend to see the growing interest in a VMT road charging scheme as one of the greatest opportunities we (IBTTA) have ever been presented. Our members, including associate and sustaining members, are the experts at all aspects of road user charging. While the role of traditional toll agencies is questionable under a VMT/ubiquitous charging scheme, whoever is responsible for collecting the VMT based user charges and processing those transactions will look to IBTTA members for expertise. We invented the technology and business processes and have been doing it successfully for decades.

I believe IBTTA needs to "own" the VMT issue. I don't think we need to commit to GPS or 5.9 GHz or any other technology at this point. We need to be the "go to" source of information and ideas on the whole universe of ubiquitous road charging. I believe if we miss this opportunity, we may become irrelevant pretty quickly because some other organization will quickly fill the void. I think partnering with AASHTO and others with an interest in this arena is essential. Given the possible changes in the role of traditional toll agencies, IBTTA needs to be open to changes in structure and operation to make sure we remain positioned as the authority on the subject.

Talker4: I don't believe we (IBTTA, the toll industry, our allies and friends, together or separately) can "own" VMT any more than Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or Twitter can "own" the Internet. Indeed, most companies don't even "own" their own brand. The customers own the brand, as Coca Cola discovered when they introduced "New Coke" and tried to phase out the original formula for Coke; then after a public backlash from their customers they re-introduced the original formula as "Coke Classic." Therefore, I'm leery of us trying to "own" anything. Having said that, I do believe we should be as "involved" as we possibly can in influencing the direction of the debate over VMT and showing how the toll industry can be the foremost solution provider. I think the gist of ALL of our comments so far (Talker1, Talker2 and Talker3) is that we in the toll industry have some very powerful tools and experiences with tolling and road pricing and we don't want the world to try to solve the transportation funding problem without consulting us. That's a given.

Having said all of that, I think I must agree with Talker2 that the toll industry is its own worst enemy when it comes to figuring out how to get to ubiquitous road user charging. The fly in the ointment is getting to real interoperability. We like to say the problem is political and business rules and not technology, but we're really only telling half the truth when we say that. To put it bluntly, each technology vendor wants the whole world to use only its own technology and every toll operator (who secretly might be happy with a one vendor solution to solve "interoperability") is reluctant to embrace interoperability because of the cost of migrating from “what I have now” to “something that I don’t have or understand that will cost me a lot of money to acquire.” Because of all this, we're stuck. We see that technology can solve many problems, and we can blame the politicians for not being more open to embrace tolling over the fuel tax. But even if the politicians would all lay down their arms and say, "I give up; let's move over to VMT as soon as possible," we in the toll industry still don't have the silver bullet that will solve all of the technology problems that continue to stand in the way of interoperability.

European interoperability is an interesting case. They have as many flavors of interoperability as Baskin Robbins has ice cream flavors. They have ETC interoperability for southern Europe; they have a separate interoperability system for the Alpine countries; they have yet another interoperability system for the Scandinavian countries; they have DSRC interoperability; and they have satellite-based interoperability. And never the twain shall meet! We in the toll industry have created (or allowed to emerge...) a big mess when it comes to ETC interoperability. What happens when 10 or 15 or 100 members of Congress turn to us and say, "Okay, we want tolling everywhere. You guys have been working on the technology and business rules of ubiquitous tolling for two decades now. I'm ready to buy your (ONE) solution." What do we do then?

This is a big problem. And, getting back to Talker1's original point, we're not going to solve it by having another technology demonstration. We need a solution that isn't so balkanized by the desire to protect parochial interests that it looks like Swiss Cheese that's been picked over by an army of mice. Before we can get to a solution that really works, at the very least we have to be honest with ourselves (the toll guys, inside the room, behind closed doors) about how far from a solution we actually are.

Twitter in Tampa

Our much anticipated Summit, The Future of Tolling: ORT and the Path to Interoperability, June 14-16, 2009 in Tampa, FL
is shaping up to be a great meeting! To enhance communication and shape meeting content, we've set up a Twitter stream so members and delegates can stay connected during the meeting. When you compose Twitter messages or “Tweets” about the meeting, please use the hashtag “#ibtta” (without quotation marks) in the body of your message. This will allow everyone to follow all of the messages relating to this Summit.

You can follow our Twitter stream here. You can explore the agenda for the Summit here. The Summit’s program features more than 100 toll industry experts whose presentations will focus on critical issues related to Open Road Tolling and Interoperability. We look forward to your joining the discussion!

-- Pat Jones