Smart Pavement: Connecting Smart Cars to Smart Cities
Smart Pavement is the future of roadways
Countless articles have been written over the last half-decade about the promising future of connected & autonomous vehicles. We’ve seen visions of a multi-gigabit-per-second wireless with 5G cellular, and cities have competed nationwide for funding opportunities to build Smart City proof-of-concepts.
At Integrated Roadways, we believe that these emerging markets will require a new kind of networking infrastructure to support and enable these new devices, vehicles, applications, and services. In the same way that the cell phones required upgrades to the landline network, and internet services required upgrades to our cable networks; Smart Cities, connected, electric, and autonomous vehicles, and 5G cellular require upgrades to our roadways and adjacent public right-of-way. These upgrades will transform the physical road network and public real-estate into a “smart infrastructure network”.
When we started working on smart infrastructure, the phrase was new and few people knew what it meant, much less why they would need it. Now the nascent global market for smart infrastructure is projected to reach $33 billion in 2020. Most current smart infrastructure projects have been smart by proximity, where the smart features are placed near a roadway — for example, adding fiber optic networking elements to an interstate build.
Admittedly, including fiber in interstate projects is a step forward, but Kiewit Construction started that practice in the 1990s with Level 3 Communications, so it’s not exactly new. To fulfill the promise of smart infrastructure we have to integrate the “smarts” directly into the infrastructure, the same way we did with smartphones.
What will smart infrastructure do for us?
- Collect data on traffic
- Transform data into views, events, reports, and notifications
- Make these data elements actionable for the owner — i.e. real-time collision notifications for zero-delay response
- Provide access to this high-resolution real-time feed to commercial users
2. Provide a “neutrally hosted network”
- This is a network where the core infrastructure is operated separately from user-services — one company maintains the infrastructure and sells access to various other 3rd parties.
- These 3rd parties are the ones who supply services to the end-users.
- This separation of network management from user subscriptions ensures that multiple ISPs, cell providers, and data users are hosted on the same facility, reducing asset duplication and total facility cost.
- The network operator is motivated to accommodate the largest number of 3rd party users as possible, providing significant pricing competition for end-users.
- Pricing competition between the 3rd parties ensures the lowest cost of access for end-users.
- The network operator is motivated to continually upgrade their network capabilities & features to attract more 3rd party users.
3. Provide “edge density” to the network
- Edge density is where the network is designed to have a large number of connection points spaced along its entire edge.
- This is like having wall-plugs every few feet in a room — pre-installing plugs along the walls means that equipment can be plugged in anywhere without having to modify the wall.
- An edge-dense network can accommodate more equipment (lighting controls, signal controls, camera & sensor systems, communications systems) without requiring physical modifications to the network.
There’s one final requirement, in our view, that smart infrastructure is incomplete if it doesn’t deliver the #1 requirement of the road network — a driving surface for vehicles!
The primary obstacle to Smart City and smart infrastructure technology is that our roads are wildly underfunded, with about 40% of all roadways needing a ground-up rebuild. That’s trillions of dollars! There’s no realistic plan to increase taxes or impose tolls in any way that is sufficient to bridge this gap. Besides, public agencies are required by statute and policy to spend most of their budget on fixing roads, not on buying fancy new smart infrastructure tech. That’s where our tweak comes into play.
Our philosophy is to build the smarts directly into the road infrastructure, so that the road itself is transformed into a smart digital network.
The benefits of this method are numerous, not the least of which is that treating the road network like a digital network providing services to data and connectivity markets will generate new revenues that can be leveraged to fund, subsidize, and eventually finance large-scale infrastructure improvements.
Integrated Roadways has recently completed a proof-of-concept installation of Smart Pavement in Denver, Colorado on Brighton Boulevard at 39th St. under contract with Colorado Department of Transportation, and with permission of the City and County of Denver.
The goal of this project was to build a small demo installation of Smart Pavement to show what the technology is, what the system can do, how to build and operate the improvements, and implement some core applications and features that begin to deliver on the promise of smart infrastructure. We will continue developing new applications that improve the value, features, and benefits of the installation that can be deployed into any new installations in the future. This transforms roads into a software platform that can be constantly upgraded at essentially no cost.
We’ll also be using the data and connectivity capabilities of Smart Pavement to demonstrate how smart infrastructure can generate new revenue opportunities to help allay the ever-increasing cost of improving road infrastructure.
Smart Pavement consists of three major components: The Smart Pavement Slab, which is a modular, prefabricated concrete paving unit with sensing and networking elements included; the Smart Pavement Control Center, which is a roadside equipment cabinet that houses the server, router, and sensor equipment; the Edge Dense Network, which interconnects the Slabs and Control Center, and enables the incorporation of third-party equipment into the network.
When building a road, reducing the construction time is a key value for everyone, and reduces frustration for the motoring public waiting for the work to be finished. That’s one reason why Integrated Roadways uses prefabricated “precast” concrete slabs to build roads as modular sections. Precast gives us an extremely high quality driving surface, and the factory-based production allows us to add technology without delaying the completion of the roadway, since it can be done off-site and ahead of time.
With a thousand accredited precast concrete plants across the United States, there’s a half-dozen qualifying production facilities near any major metro area. Not only is the road building process faster with precast, but it takes a smaller “footprint” on the project site, improving efficiency. It reduces onsite labor and can be installed by crews that are familiar with traditional road-building processes with little to no retraining.
The factory delivers finished slabs “just in time” for installation in the roadway, enabling an extremely time-efficient build process. The pavement is “cured” enough for traffic by the time it’s installed. We have to “grout” the pavement so that it’s glued down, but that only takes about 30 minutes before we’re ready to open the road.
We install a Smart Pavement Control Center nearby to operate the sensors. The Control Center is overbuilt so we can install additional server equipment later to expand the services and features without having to replace cabinets.
The Control Center syncs with a cloud interface to upload metadata, reports, infographics, a real-time and historical dashboard, event notifications, and alerts. This allows users to access the information coming from the roadway anywhere they have an internet connection. The system can also push notifications and alerts to the management facility and administrators when something happens — like a vehicle leaves the roadway, goes the wrong direction, or crashes.
We think of Smart Pavement as turning roads into touch-pads and Wi-Fi routers that are PC-compatible and can run any future applications that someone can dream up. When PCs were brand new, the first applications were word processors and calculators, but those simple applications were valuable enough for lots of businesses to buy PCs. As more businesses bought more PCs, more developers wrote more programs, and 30 years later, teenagers are playing Fortnight on their smartphones (or is it Apex Legends this week?).
In the same way, the first apps we’re developing for Smart Pavement are the simplest, earliest-stage, and pack an enormous and immediate value for the roadway owner. We’re currently working on:
- Vehicle counts (traffic patterns and analytics in real-time and historically across time of day, week, month, year)
- Vehicle speeds (average speeds, 85th percentile, peaks, and more)
Note that speed information does not identify any specific person or vehicle.
- Vehicle weights
- Vehicle directions (for identifying wrong-way driver events)
Coming up next on the development roadmap are a few more advanced features that build on these early capabilities:
- Automated lane-departure identification & reporting
- Automated run-off-the-road identification & reporting
- Automated collision identification & reporting
These early applications are focused on improving value to the owner, but the data we’re collecting has significant value beyond the immediate use to the public agency. Consider Google’s AdWords program — Google collects enormous amount of traffic data from its search engine. It uses that data to connect advertisers to people searching for things. In the same way, the data we are collecting has value to commercial users for things like property development, brick & mortar advertising, commercial fleet management, mobility, navigation, positioning, mapping, and vehicle routing services, and much more.
And because we build the network to be edge-dense from the beginning, Smart Pavement provides in-road and roadside “expansion ports” for sensors or antennas. We can expand services through software applications, through rack space in the Control Center, through implementing new hardware features into pre-built expansion ports — for example, installing 5G antennas directly in the roadway for high-speed communication with connected and autonomous vehicles. We can even build in dynamic in-motion wireless charging for electric vehicles to recharge your EV as you drive.
By storing the maps that autonomous vehicles need in the Control Center, reading vehicle positions in real time, and serving the merged map + vehicle positions on-demand through the edge dense neutral host network, a Smart Pavement system installed in 2019 will continue to provide new services and features for decades into the future, ensuring that our clients who are investing in smart infrastructure today will continue to gain value from those investments across the entire 35-to-50-year life of the roadway.
The public of the United States collectively owns hundreds of billions of square feet of extremely important real estate all throughout our Cities and States, represented by our roadways and public right-of-ways. Arguably, this public real estate is the most valuable in the City or State, because nearly all movement of people and goods takes place on it.
However, the real-estate creates an enormous unfunded liability for the public, because despite all the economic activity that roadways enable, the roadway generates essentially zero direct revenues that can be used to fund improvements and operation. And despite popular misunderstanding, fuel taxes get parceled out and only a fraction ever make it to the DOT for roads.
That’s why we believe that deploying smart infrastructure with integral digital technologies like Smart Pavement is such a game-changer for how we build, operate, and pay for roadways in the United States. If we can use public real estate to generate revenue from the new value-added digital services for Smart Cities, connected, electric, and autonomous vehicles, and new communications services like 5G cellular, we can leverage those revenues to finance the improvement of public roadways nationwide. This would transform the loss-leader of public roads into an extremely valuable and economically productive asset that would no longer require funding from taxes, and pays for itself via advanced digital services without requiring tolls.
If roads that pay for themselves by enabling connected, electric, and autonomous vehicles, Smart Cities, and advanced wireless services sounds interesting to you, keep an eye on smart infrastructure, and tell your DOT or Public Works department you want Smart Pavement in your community.
