The US DoT has released a national deployment plan for the further implementation of V2X technology in the hopes of improving road safety. V2X (vehicle-to-everything) enables vehicles talk to each other, warning when there’s a risk of collision.
“V2X can prioritize emergency vehicles,” says Sarah Kaufman, the director of NYU’s Rudin Center for Transportation. “For example, a traffic light can stay green or turn green for an approaching ambulance to ensure that the ambulance can get through more quickly.”
“This technology has been around for quite a number of years, but there’s always been this chicken-or-egg argument as to, ‘Should it be on the vehicle, should it be out in the infrastructure?’” said Shailen Bhatt, administrator of the Federal Highway Administration. “This gives everybody certainty around what is going to happen.”
According to Marketplace.org, under the Department of Transportation’s roadmap, V2X would be deployed along 50% of the National Highway System and at 40% of the country’s intersections by 2031.
As for vehicles, “I think you’re going to see that deployment in fleets earlier. And then I think you know in the plan, it is estimating that we could see it in passenger vehicles by the 2028 model year,” said Laura Chace, president and CEO of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America.
And a slow rollout may not be a bad idea, according to Cliff Braun, associate director of technology policy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
(Pic – Cohda Wireless)
