WEATHER AND TRANSPORTATION: TOWARD AN AGENDA

Remarks of
Jeffrey N. Shane
Under Secretary for Policy

Third National Surface Transportation Weather Symposium

Vienna, VA
July 25, 2007

Introduction

I’m glad to be here today to speak about the importance of weather information -- information that is vital to addressing many of the challenges the transportation sector faces in unlocking congestion and improving safety.

Secretary Peters, and the rest of us at the U.S. Department of Transportation, have a great interest in the results you achieve. Weather has consistently posed some of the most important challenges confronting our surface transportation system. Thanks to your work, we have the opportunity to further improve not only our safety and security, but also our quality of life and economic productivity.

I am proud to report that we have made significant progress in the three short years ago since I spoke at the American Meteorological Society’s Weather and Highways Forum about the Department’s efforts to address weather-related challenges. I applaud the collaborative efforts of the weather community in making these advances and know that we will continue to push the envelope in this very challenging area.

This symposium has some important goals. In particular, we need to be clear about our research priorities and to share information on how various weather management and weather information products and services can facilitate better decision-making. And we we need to understand – and to be able to articulate -- the social and economic benefits that are derived from those products and services.

Let me step back, though, and spend a few moments describing the context for DOT’s interest in all of this. The Department is currently pursuing initiatives in three critically important areas, as defined by Secretary Peters nearly a year ago:

• reducing congestion;
• improving safety; and
• advancing 21st Century solutions.

Congestion Initiative

All of us are more than familiar with the impact of congestion on our transportation system – most of us live through it every day. It slows our nation’s economic growth and compromises our quality of life. Economists tell us that, in 2003, Americans lost 3.7 billion hours and wasted 2.3 billion gallons of fuel sitting in traffic. We wasted $9.4 billion as a result of airline delays. All told, we lose an estimated $200 billion a year in productivity because of congestion on highways, airports and waterways.

Last year, DOT announced a major initiative aimed at reducing congestion across the nation’s transportation system. This initiative, the National Strategy to Reduce Congestion on America's Transportation Network, provides a blueprint for federal, state, and local officials to use in addressing congestion more effectively. You won’t be surprised to hear that we seem to have tapped a mother-lode of interest and enthusiasm throughout the country.

Under the Congestion Initiative, the Department is working to establish Urban Partnership Agreements with selected communities, and encouraging states to tap private sector resources and expertise to improve their transportation systems.

We’ve also established a competitive process for designating new “Corridors of the Future,” and have focused Departmental attention and resources on freight congestion – particularly at key freight gateways in Southern California and along our nation’s border. We’re working with states and localities to spread the deployment of exciting new traffic solutions that employ new technologies and other innovations. And finally, we’re pursuing policies that accelerate major airport capacity projects and move planes in and out of airports more efficiently.

Weather-related events cause fifteen percent of the congestion we face, or about 1 billion hours per year of system delay. For some reason, transportation economists call this “non-recurring” congestion, probably to distinguish it from the day-in, day-out congestion attributable to the imbalance between demand and capacity. Wouldn’t it be nice if weather delays really were non-recurring. Alas, they do recur, over and over again, and with a frequency that has a huge impact on the efficiency and reliability of our transport system.

If you know that a particular trip that should take 10 minutes will take 30 minutes longer, it’s a loss but you can plan for it. When you don’t know each day whether it’ll take 20 minutes or 45 minutes, you have to plan for the worst. That’s the extra challenge of dealing with weather related congestion.

It’s really not possible to overstate the importance of putting timely, detailed surface weather information in the hands of the people that manage, operate and use our transportation system. If we’re serious in our determination to tackle the congestion challenge, state-of-the-art weather information should be treated as an essential component of our strategy.

Increasing Safety

Safety has always been – and it certainly continues to be -- a major priority for DOT. We were gratified to learn that we saw a 2 percent reduction in highway fatalities last year – 868 deaths fewer than in 2005. Fatalities in passenger vehicles fell to the lowest annual total since 1993. That’s the good news. The bad news is that, despite these improvements, we still lost 42,642 people in highway accidents in 2006. It goes without saying, therefore, that there is lots of room for further improvement.

Again, weather is a major factor in the equation. We estimate that about one-quarter of all highway crashes are attributable to weather. Nearly a fifth of our highway fatalities occur in weather-related accidents each year.

The impact of weather on transportation safety can be seen in other modes as well. On our railroads, 865 weather-related crashes or incidents occurred between 1995 and 2005, causing 8 deaths, 1,242 injuries, and property damage amounting to more than $189 million. Of these, about 63 percent of the fatalities and 91 percent of the injuries were associated with extreme temperature variations that caused buckling of the rail.

Between 1996 and 2000, weather-related factors accounted for 11 percent of the accidents that occurred in our marine transportation system. Weather was a key factor in 3.6 percent of all recreational boating accidents.

On our pipeline systems, in 2005 alone, the pipeline sector experienced 4 weather-related fatalities and 14 weather-related injuries. Three of the fatalities were attributed to incidents caused by temperature and one to high winds; all four incidents were in natural gas distribution activities.

In aviation, weather affects operations both on the ground and in the air. For example, airport ground operations, such as baggage loading and unloading, refueling, ramp activities, passenger transport to aircraft, cease when lightning is detected within a certain distance of an airport.

As with congestion reduction, placing good surface weather information in the hands of the people that manage, operate and use the transportation system can make a difference in saving lives.

Advancing Technology

DOT is placing a special emphasis on deploying innovative technologies in the quest for effective solutions to our transportation challenges. Here are a few examples:

The Intelligent Transportation System Joint Program Office in our Research and Innovative Technology Administration is currently advancing the Vehicle Infrastructure Integration program. This program aims to create and deploy a communications infrastructure that supports vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle communications. Data transmitted from the roadside to the vehicle could warn a driver that it is not safe to enter an intersection. Vehicles could serve as data collectors and anonymously transmit traffic, weather and road condition information from every major road within the transportation network. Such information would provide transportation agencies with the information needed to implement proactive, real-time strategies to relieve traffic congestion and improve safety.

The Next Generation Air Transportation System is a revolutionary approach that will enable us to handle up to three times today’s traffic levels using satellite-based navigation, surveillance, and networking technologies. Again, weather is an essential component of this planning.

New technologies for rail transportation safety are being developed and tested by the Federal Railroad Adminstration. Last year, new safety devices for commuter trains that are designed to better protect passengers during crashes were tested. For example, the FRA’s newly designed Crash-Energy Management system includes crush zones that absorb the force of a crash to better protect the parts of trains where passengers and train operators sit. The crush zones have stronger end frames that act as bumpers to distribute crash forces throughout an entire train and soften the impact.

DOT is working with seven consortia under a Commercial Remote Sensing and Spatial Information initiative. The intention is to exploit remote sensing technology in the planning and development of transportation infrastructure. The products would be useful for infrastructure asset management, environmental impact assessment and freight congestion mitigation. In the future, fully developed, fully integrated remote sensing technologies could help to identify and locate events related to extreme weather conditions, assess damage to infrastructure systems, plan for recovery operations and mitigate congestion caused by unplanned events related to weather events.

These are just a few of the initiatives and technologies that we are working on at DOT to help us achieve our goals.

DOT’s Commitment to Weather Research

Recognizing that weather affects the safety, mobility and productivity of all transportation modes, DOT is actively engaged in research, development and deployment activities relating to the application of advanced technologies to mitigate or manage the impacts of weather.

For highways, the Federal Highway Administration’s Road Weather Management Program has been working to integrate advanced weather technologies for data collection, forecasting, and modeling with transportation decision-making to develop and implement innovative road weather management products and tools. The tools include Clarus, MDSS and Weather Responsive Traffic Management strategies.

Clarus -- which you will hear about later in this meeting -- is a major ITS initiative led by FHWA to improve the quality of road weather information by combining data from various sources and building the observational database that supports that information. Clarus is also intended to enable a variety of value-added road weather management products and services that can be used for advanced traveler information and warning systems, highway maintenance and operations activities, traffic control and management, and other transportation applications that help reduce delays, crashes and other incidents on the roads.

FHWA also developed and is now actively deploying the Winter Maintenance Decision Support System or MDSS. This is a winter maintenance tool that combines advanced weather and road condition predictions with winter maintenance rules of practice to recommend appropriate treatment strategies for highways. It is the most advanced road weather management application to date, and is now being used by many agencies at the State and local levels. The application of this decision-support system will contribute to safe and uninterrupted flow of traffic in various weather conditions.

Additionally, FHWA is engaged in research related to the modeling of traffic under varying weather conditions. It’s only when we fully understand how drivers and vehicles interact with the road and each other under adverse weather that we can develop the means to better control the traffic through such efforts as weather-responsive traffic signal timing, dynamic message signs or ramp metering.

On the aviation side, improved weather capabilities are key elements of the Integrated Plan for the “NextGen” system I described earlier. In today’s system, weather information is drawn from numerous forecast sources. The resulting air transportation decision making suffers when different and inconsistent weather forecast sources are used, resulting in different decisions and conflicting courses of action. The NextGen concept for weather hinges on consistently managing common, current and forecast weather information, distributed using a secure, network-enabled weather communications infrastructure, and integrated into NextGen user decision-making processes. An effort is needed to fuse tens of thousands of ground-, airborne-, and space-based weather observations, and various forecasts, into a single, national, and eventually global weather information system, constantly updated as needed.

DOT is making a substantial commitment to improving the collection and use of surface weather information. But we aren’t in this alone; that’s why I applaud the collaborative efforts of the entire weather community in working to improve the state of the practice in this most important endeavor.

Climate Change

As we are learning, climate change holds the potential for more frequent and more severe weather events, making your work even more important. Climate change research is another area relating transportation and weather that is important for collaboration. DOT’s Climate Change Center is collaborating with the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA, and EPA to evaluate the potential impacts of climate change and variability on transportation systems and infrastructure along the Central U.S. Gulf Coast.

The purpose of this study is to develop knowledge and tools that will help transportation decisionmakers use environmental and climate trend information in transportation system planning. The project used information about potential impacts of climate change and variability on transportation infrastructure and systems to develop tools to assist in the assessment of risks and the evaluation of response strategies.

A strong partnership between DOT and NOAA

This symposium makes it clear that research in both the transportation and weather communities, public or private, is multi-faceted and ever advancing. The challenge for us is to take advantage of research findings and technological advances from both our communities, while strategically focusing on the real-world needs of transportation decision makers.

Financial resources are necessary, of course, but more than money is required. Our success will depend on involving the broad range of expertise that the people at this symposium represent. The work, by definition, must be approached as a cross-disciplinary, collaborative venture.

To date, several key documents have served to guide us in this area:

(1) “Weather Information for Surface Transportation: National Needs Assessment Report,” published in 2002 and also known as the WIST report;
(2) the National Research Council’s report, “Where the Weather Meets the Road”; and
(3) the Memorandum of Understanding between FHWA and NOAA, which was signed by then FHWA Administrator and now Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters together with Commerce Department Under Secretary and NOAA Administrator Vice Admiral Lautenbacher.

These documents not only identified the types of research and development activities we need to undertake to address weather problems but also indicated which agencies need to be engaged and how they can work together to achieve their objectives.

Both DOT and NOAA have critical roles to play in order to achieve success, with partnership and collaboration at the forefront. While NOAA moves forward in surface transportation weather research, DOT will concentrate on developing the strategies and solutions for the transportation community, turning this information into actions that make the roads safer and more efficient.

Together, we will define research needs to satisfy the unmet requirements captured in the WIST report, share research and development results to ensure a smooth flow of information from one discipline to the other, and explore outreach and education efforts to build expertise in weather as it relates to our surface transportation system.

Conclusion

We have an important vision of system-wide improvements that will improve the efficiency, safety, and mobility of the surface transportation system under all types of adverse weather.

But we’re at a crossroads. We have a special opportunity to make a difference by contributing to our nation’s economic vitality and promise of a better future. Cross-departmental coordination is critical as we envision a system that will allow those who use our transportation networks – drivers, freight shippers, and transit operators – to make better informed decisions on using the nation’s transportation network. Through the Department’s Congestion Initiative, research and technology, and partnerships such as this, DOT is working to save lives, keep our economy growing, and face the weather challenges of tomorrow.

We look forward to working with all of you to achieve these critical objectives.

Thank you.

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