T3 Webinar Question and Answer Transcript

Steve Mortensen: The URL will be made available on the T3 Webinar site. And again, that was just recently posted on the National Transportation Library. You can probably type in the report number. Also, if you didn't get that whole email you can just send an email to T3@dot.gov and we'll be happy to send you the link.

Steve Mortensen: Cameras with respect to the Transit Safety Retrofit Package, that's a part of the evaluation. That's a part of the data acquisition system because we needed to know if, for example, if a pedestrian is stepping out into the intersection and then for the vehicle turning right in front of the bus, we needed to know if we could see that the vehicle was indeed coming from the left and then took a right in front of the bus. So it is not required as a part of the applications.

Steve Mortensen: So, again, for the Transit Safety Retrofit Package buses—they are transmitting the basic safety message. For the V2V for the safety applications that use V2V communications, they are receiving basic safety messages from other vehicles, other equipped vehicles. For the pedestrian and signalized crosswalk warning, what's being received by the bus via the roadside unit at that one intersection that Dave Valentine talked about is the SPAT message. The pedestrian detection data objects are included in the SPAT message. Also, there's the MAP message for that particular intersection. And I think those are the data inputs.

Steve Mortensen: As a part of the National Transit Database Crash Statistics Analysis, we discovered that there's an issue with collisions at midblock including bicyclists at bike crossings. So that would be something if we do continue, if we do additional applications development work, that would be a likely candidate that we would add to that particular application.

Steve Mortensen: So the Department of Transportation is pursuing this connected vehicle research, cooperative research. So the advantage of DSRC is that it has low latency abilities for vehicle-to-vehicle communications. There is another model—the Google Car is an example of that—where it's autonomous and uses onboard sensors. The FTA did conduct an analysis back in the days when we had the integrated vehicle-based safety systems research where we looked at different type of collision avoidance technologies that were more autonomous For collision, site collision things like that. I'd have to answer that by each method has its strengths and its weaknesses but the department has decided to pursue DSRC vehicle-to-vehicle communications for crash-imminent safety applications.

Steve Mortensen: I don't know if I fully understand that question, but the concept is that the application should be smart enough to know what lane it is in and where the pedestrian is if there is a potential collision between the two. So we discovered that the TRP equipped buses were not always traveling on the route that we had intended, the route that would take that left- or right-hand turn at that intersection but was going straight, we did notice that there were some false positives. But the application was supposed to be intelligent enough to be able to differentiate between that.

Tom Timcho: Okay. Well, I think the real difference is with the Connect and Ride application we are using an open source planner right now that we have some control over. And also we are integrating some partners that do not specifically have the GTFS feed. The Google Map Trip Planning, at this time, has some specific requirements that you integrate with them. They define the interfaces. We did look at Google Map but decided to be able to maintain the necessary control for the duration of this research and evaluation period that we needed to have something where we could control what the output of the product was. And as you know, Google is making changes on a somewhat regular basis. That would be difficult for us to be able to evaluate against.

Steve Mortensen: As a part of the Dynamic Mobility Applications program that Bob Sheehan mentioned, there is one set of applications, the multimodal intelligent traffic signal system work, that's being done. So there's an application within that bundle that focuses on intelligent transit signal priority. So, yes, that work is being conducted, but no IDTO is another set of applications as a part of the dynamic mobility applications program.

Greg Zinc: So, for the GTFS-RT, what we do is we subscribe to a feed. In this case, it's COTA. And so we are going to get that feed every four minutes and so COTA updates the schedule that somebody can plan against. It updates basically the GTFS feed that's in the back. So it doesn't do any real-time notifying of the traveler that something has changed. But if a traveler would come in and search for another trip, they would get the updated schedule. So if the original plan was I'm going to search for a trip starting now and I want to catch a bus to go downtown, and the original schedule said the bus was going to be in ten minutes but they send a GTFS real-time feed that updates it and says no, it's actually going to be 12 minutes, the traveler would know when they search for that trip that that bus has been delayed and what the new departure time is.

Steve Mortensen: I don't know the answer to that question, unfortunately. I'll give just a little bit of background information. When we introduced the TRP project into the model deployment, we were behind the rest of the program so we had to come up to speed and had a very short period of time. The SmartWalk technology that was introduced was a part of what was proposed. Dave, do you know any price differentials between the different technologies? We examined both, but what we made our decision based on really was at the time the fact that we had concern about the high-speed camera being able to operate in all the different environmental conditions whereas the Doppler radar was not subject to the same things, whether it was low visibility or low light or snowfall or anything else we thought maybe the video camera could have affected. Now a few years later, there's been significant advances, so, hence, the recommendation to resurvey the technologies and that being one of them. But, yeah, it was essentially beyond our scope to get into the pricing and actually implementing it so we did not take a close relook at pricing.

Dave Valentine: Yeah, there's the VSM signals coming from the car that's being received by the DCRC on the bus and it's computing whether the target classification is changing from beside the bus to in front of the bus and then making it turn out a 5.5 degree angle change into towards the front of the bus.

Unidentified Male Voice: We've got a general orientation, but for the specific application in both Columbus and later in central Florida, we've got some specific issues that we are addressing. But the dynamic rider share, though we are focused on in Columbus, is for the general public. In the central Florida area would actually be limited to students, faculty, and staff at the university given the nature of the rideshare provider.

Steve Mortensen: I'll answer the question this way. The PCW was only in the transit buses. It was not an application that was in the integrated vehicles or the after-market safety device-equipped vehicles. It could be logically applied to any type of vehicle.