From cars to telephones and household appliances, all sorts of once-dumb devices have been made smart with the addition of computer technology. Now there's talk of smart roads that can monitor their own wear and tear while alerting motorists to traffic and road conditions — and even detecting and reporting accidents the moment they occur.
Later this year, the Colorado Department of Transportation will begin testing smart road technology along a half-mile stretch of Highway 285 in the state's Park County. The highway's conventional road surface will be overlain with interlocking concrete slabs, each 56 feet long and featuring Wi-Fi connectivity and embedded fiber optic cables that act as pressure sensors.
The sensors are designed to "feel" vehicles on the road to turn it into "the equivalent of a laptop touchpad," said Tim Sylvester, CEO of Integrated Roadways, the Kansas City, Missouri firm that developed the factory-made slabs to be used in the five-year test.
The test's primary goal will be to determine if the new road surface can save lives along a stretch of road that has a high rate of vehicular accidents.
"If you've driven off the road, smart pavements can detect when and where this happened and automatically send an alert to the emergency services to come help you," Sylvester said. "This will rapidly shorten the time before people get help."
In addition to detecting accidents, Sylvester said, the smart slabs will connect to motorists' cellphones to provide real-time alerts about traffic and road hazards. (Such information can now be obtained via apps like Waze, but these require motorists to provide the information.) And as self-driving vehicles become more common, he said, road information could be delivered wirelessly to the cars' built-in software to optimize their driving performance and efficiency.
If all that sounds good, the technology is not without its skeptics.
Charles Schwartz, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Maryland, called the technology "an interesting idea" that could have "real potential for these remote rural areas with many times the average accident rate." But he wonders about reliability. "If the cable breaks inside one of these panels," he said, "what happens? Does that interrupt the entire network?"
Then there's the matter of cost. Integrated Roadways estimates that roads made with the new technology would run about $4 million per lane per mile, or about twice as much as conventional roads. Schwartz thinks that might prove to be a stumbling block. "In terms of large-scale implementation across the highway network, the costs would be high so the technology would have to prove that it can make a real difference to warrant that kind of investment."
But Sylvester said the sale of traffic information could help defray the higher cost. "If you think about it, what type of business you should put in a particular location is largely dependent on traffic," he said. "This is valuable information, and by using it to generate revenue, we could finance the expansion of the network across the nation."
For now, Schwartz is encouraged that new road technologies are being tested. "In the past, the highway industry has been known as unwilling to gamble on new things," he said. "So I think it's a good thing that Colorado's saying, 'Yes, let's see what this technology can do. Maybe it can help us with some of our problems.'"