COLUMBUS — “Connecting Vehicles”
While Nokia connected lives, the city of Columbus is connecting vehicles- letting them talk to each other. In such an environment the motor vehicles and traffic services are in sync with each other and share potential information about the prospective situations to enhance road safety.
In a connected environment, vehicles will be able to transmit alerts of prospective scenarios including potential threats, road conditions, collisions, traffic, etc. to the vehicles on the same route. Traditionally, certain aspects of these are reported and recorded with the help of manual intervention, and with that being eliminated, my perspective is that the accuracy and precision of data collection and analysis would only rise.
The communication interfaces in the system adhere to certain specific standards that prospectively will allow the environment to be easily expanded in the future with the devices using the same standards. A standardized architecture will help to scale the system if need be. The on-board units(OBU) are, in this initial phase, free for every private and public vehicle which gives this program a great head-start.
However, there have been giant manufacturers who have been using these systems in their cars, like Hyundai with their Blue Link, Ford with FordPass; thus there is a probable solution to bring all these services and to be integrated into one giant system, thus eliminating the cost of installing OBU’s on every vehicle on the road or a new system entirely.
The city plans to get OBUs to be installed on a subset of vehicles; public and private running along High St. & Cleveland Ave, from Morse Road to Steltzer road. These OBUs are the heart of the system that will be in real-time connected to the roadside units that in turn will be the point of interaction with different services like police, emergency dispatch, accident alerts, etc.
This system could also benefit in a variety of optional scenarios- Red Light Violation Warning, Lane Change Warning, Blind Spot Warning, Reduced Speed School Zone, Emergency Electric Brake Application, etc. All this might not take down road accidents to a certain zero but would definitely allow achieving a measurable benefit.
