Save More Lives - Preserve the 5.9 GHz Spectrum

Earlier this week, I was honored to participate in a roundtable discussion, hosted by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), on the use of the 5.9 GHz spectrum for transportation safety.

To understand where we are today, it’s important to understand how we got here. In 1997, ITS America petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allocate the 5.9 GHz band for transportation safety critical communications. The FCC opened that band in 2004.

Those of us who work in transportation understand the value of preserving something for the future –it’s much easier to build something knowing it will be used for decades to come than to go back and try and build it once the environment has been altered. This was the same forethought put into creating the safety spectrum 20 years ago.

In 2013, GM was the first to use the safety spectrum by equipping the Cadillac CTS with Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) technology, which relied on the 5.9GHz band to allow vehicles to communicate with each other and the infrastructure. This technology has the potential to save lives, reduce crashes, increase mobility, and move toward a more sustainable transportation system. Vehicle- to-vehicle (V2V) communication has the potential to help drivers avoid or mitigate 70-80 percent of vehicle crashes involving unimpaired drivers. The idea was that GM’s announcement, along with regulatory certainty related to which V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) technology should be used (DSRC or something else), would result in other automakers jumping on board.

Last spring, Toyota announced it would deploy DSRC across its entire U.S. fleet in 2021. And at last year’s ITS America Annual Meeting in Detroit, GM announced it would expand the technology to all Cadillacs as well as one of its crossover models.

Public agencies have also made significant investments in V2X technology in public infrastructure. You can look across the country and see that most states and dozens of cities have invested in connected vehicle technology.

The Colorado Department of Transportation, which I led for nearly four years, initially deployed DSRC on some of its roads. Now that technology is evolving, it’s using dual-technology roadside units (DSRC and cellular V2X, known as CV2X) on I-25 and I-70. Wyoming is under a blizzard watch as I’m writing, but truckers can move freight more safely across I-80 today because of this technology. Salt Lake City has used V2X to improve the reliability of its worst-performing transit line, from 85% to 93% on time. New York City has equipped 7,000 vehicles with devices that warn them that pedestrians are about to enter intersections.

Michigan, California, Florida, Pennsylvania, Utah – and the list goes on. This doesn’t happen overnight. Developing and then deploying these life-saving technologies takes time.

We are so close to achieving our vision of a better future transformed by intelligent mobility - a future in which cars don’t crash and people don’t spend 90 hours of their lives in traffic. This technology can alert vehicles not to enter an intersection because a distracted driver is about to blow through it at high speed, and it can allow ambulances and other emergency vehicles to arrive at hospitals with the extra minutes needed to save someone’s life.

 We are on the cusp of realizing this vision of a safer transportation system. At this critical juncture, it is the wrong time to allow regulatory uncertainty to force companies and agencies to pause deployments of V2X technologies. It is unacceptable to continue allowing 100 people to die every day on U.S. roadways when the technology exists to significantly reduce the number of lives lost and shattered.