ITS Program Advisory Committee

ITS Program Advisory Committee Meeting

U.S. Department of Transportation
November 27, 2007
Day 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Topic Page

Introduction

Report on Results of ITSPAC and Other Interviews

Future Vision for ITS Program

Summary of Outcomes

Next Steps in Strategic Planning Activities

Introduction

Shelley Row:  Let's go ahead and get started.  It looks like we have pretty much everybody from yesterday, and we have one new person. Ken, would you mind to introduce yourself?

Ken Button:  Sure, I'm Ken Button, I'm Professor of Public Policy, George Mason University.

Shelley Row:  Welcome, Ken.

Well, we're going to pick up the discussion where we left off yesterday.  As we mentioned yesterday, that day was all about getting smart on the history of the program and what the current program is composed of. Today, however, we want to really jump into that creativity and the thinking about what is the future program look like.  So what we are hoping to get out of today, is where we left off in our discussion yesterday, what are the big ideas, those few big ideas about what the future of this program can and should be, that make it compelling and exciting and provide great leverage to improve our transportation environment.  

So that's where we're going.  We're going to do that through a series of discussions.  We've provided you -- it was in your read-ahead material, but we've given you another copy of the agenda.  What you will note is, is that we're going to start at a very high level with a broad-brush discussion of trends, and then we're going to gradually, over the course of the day, drill down from trends to what we see the vision for our community and our environment being, and then going into the opportunities and barriers that we are dealing with, and then work our way into, what are the implications for the program. 

So we're going to get all the way through those discussions.  I would say to you on the agenda, you will see all of those discussions on there, but we reserve the ability to move the breaks around, to be flexible with the time and the discussion based on your input and how our discussion is going.

You will also be glad to know that we have bottles of water that are cooling right now in the refrigerator, so those are available to you, and we'll also be having lunch brought in.  So, we'll try to make that part of your day a little bit easier today.

On our discussions, I also wanted to mention to you, each one of those, kind of, four blocks of discussions will be preceded by a very short presentation.  Basically on the input that we have from DOT staff on each of those four topics, trends, vision, opportunities and barriers, and then the implications for the program.  We wanted to come in here with you today, to have something to throw on the table, but feel free to throw it completely out, to completely change it, but we wanted at least to have some of our thoughts to put out on the table for you as a starting point.   But they are just that, they are just a straw starting point, and they are very brief, so most of the time will be for your discussion.

I also wanted to reintroduce Joyce Bader to you all.  Joyce is a consultant who's been working with us on strategic planning, she is a strategic planning specialist, as well as organizational development.  She just happens to be also helping us today in facilitating the discussion with you all.  But she will be working with all of us in DOT, specifically in RITA, to take what we hear from you, take the input we hear from others as well, and taking it to the next step, which is more of a strategic document, strategic direction for the program.  So, you'll see a lot of Joyce today, she'll be facilitating that discussion.

I think that's all the introductory, are there any -- anything else before we jump in? Again, we're looking for a lot of discussions, so please don't hold back.

Okay, with that, Andy, why don't you pull up the --.  Now, just so I know, Andy, are you taking notes on one -- okay, okay. Okay, you can go on to the next slide.

Okay, this is what we were just talking about, that's kind of our agenda for the day, and we're going to start with our discussion of trends.

Report on Results of ITSPAC and Other Interviews

The other thing I wanted to mention to you, before I share with you some of the thoughts that came from the USDOT staff.  We provided in your read-aheads, but then we also provided again to you today, these are the summary of the interviews that we did with all of you.  Now we have, actually have right here, the full text version if you want to know what you said, or if you want to know what somebody else said.  But these are the summaries of each of the questions that were asked of all of you.  So you can scan through that pretty quickly, it's interesting reading.

The other thing that we provided to you was a distillation -- this is on this one-pager -- of some of the things that we thought we heard from you.  I don't intend to walk through this, because I expect you know what you said, and I expect that to come out in our discussion with you all, but I wanted you to see, and have in front of you, a distillation of all those, the input that we received.  It was very excellent.

Future Vision for ITS Program

Trends

Okay.  All right.  Let's talk about trends.  Now, when we started the discussion of trends within DOT, there were so many issues that are going on in our world, that we felt a need to kind of clump them into big clumps.  We chose these three.  They seemed reasonable, but there's no -- nothing magic about this.  What we expected was, that we were going to be looking for the place where the world trends, the technology trends, the transportation trends come together, and that's what we thought we were going to be looking for.

So, let's go ahead and -- here's some of the things that came out of our discussion.  Trends that we see in the world, the changing customer base, the aging population, young tech savvy people -- they don't have to be young I would mention -- multilingual people.  Those are our customers and they're changing.

I would also mention, I think it is important that as we have our conversation, this is a research program, the things we're doing are for the future and help us set the stage for the future.  I do find it useful to think about the world that the 20-somethings and the teenagers are living in today.  What are their expectations and what are their world trends, because they're the one's who will be reaping a lot of the benefits that we'll be discussing today.

Other world trends, technology explosion, there's information everywhere.  Every Starbucks, you can have free Wi-Fi access.  We're in a wireless world.  Everyone probably sitting here has one of these or something like somewhere close by.  Everything is online, it's virtual life, virtual work, virtual personal networks, and Presidential debates using You Tube, networking and having friends who are virtual friends.

The global economy, outsourcing, production in the world, markets that are worldwide, you know, we see that so much when we talk with the auto companies and others, who have worldwide markets.  Financial markets are worldwide.

Another world trend, sustainable communities, we heard some of that yesterday as well.  Communities that support lifestyle choice, whatever that lifestyle choice is, whether that be living in a rural area, living in suburbia, or living in a downtown city and not needing a car.  All of those are lifestyle choices and people want to be able to make those choices and have their communities serve their needs.

Security issues -- you know, we seem to have to a growing tolerance for how our security issues disrupt our lives.  I take a little plastic bag with me now, every time I fly, and I think that's -- I think that’s normal, maybe not normal, but it's what we do.  We felt like that we see a growing acceptance of surveillance and monitoring technologies.  There's so much of that and there are people who are concerned about it, but there are many more people who seem to accept it.

Environmental awareness, clearly we heard that yesterday all over the place, clearly an interest in being environmentally aware and the impact of our choices on the environment, and we see a consumer's willingness to pay for more environmentally-friendly options. 

We see a growing market for transportation services, increasing world population we heard discussed yesterday.  This is an interesting one.  The use of performance measure in public policy.  You see that across a broad spectrum of public policy.  No Child Left Behind is based on performance measures.  In the healthcare industry, we see the growth of performance measures.  We see it also in transportation as well, in the use of performance measures in making decisions based on performance measures.

Okay.  In terms of technology trends, probably not any shock here to anyone, wireless world, being connected anywhere, everywhere.  A growing expectation for information, I think we expect today to be able to get whatever information we want, at our fingertips, whenever we want it.

Consolidation and increasing functionality into a single device, being able to use this device that has internet access, as a cell phone, it has all of my contacts on it, everything is consolidated into one device, and the device keeps getting smaller.  Very rapid technology evolution, it's so fast it's hard to keep up with it, but it's clearly a trend that we're living with.

We're seeing a growth in the use of navigation technologies.  I don't -- maybe someone here even knows what the numbers are, but clearly, there are more of these today than there were before.  Exploding market for handheld wireless devices, that market has really just gone through the roof.

Technology in vehicles, my husband put himself through college with a set of socket wrenches, fixing cars.  You can't fix cars anymore with a set of socket wrenches, high technology everywhere on the vehicle.  The technology that's in our daily lives, how many of our household products are computerized and have to be programmed?  My dishwasher is programmable, my microwave is programmable, the television, the TiVo, the VCR, all of those things.  There's technology that is permeated into all aspects of our lives, into our vehicles, into the services, automated phone answering systems, for pretty much everything that we do.

And then transportation trends, we talked yesterday about growing congestion, the exponential growth in freight movement, a big impact on our transportation network.  An aging infrastructure, it's a big deal.  Increasingly strained finances in the public sector, everywhere we go, no matter who we talk to in the public sector, one of the clear trends that we see, is trying to do more with less money.  There's just not enough financial resources to do the things that we need to do, even at the basic level, maintaining the existing system that we have. 

We see a trend in monetizing transportation assets, toll roads, leasing of facilities, much of that driven by a need to find some creative ways to finance and to provide financing into our transportation network.

We see a growing role of the private sector in many of those areas.  Looking to the private sector, the financial markets and ways to creatively engage with the private sector to help solve some of these financial problems.

We see growing trends at ridership, we see an increasing support for investment in transit.  Transportation to support our lifestyle choice, and not as a detraction from it.  People want to be able to use transportation to live their lives, not to be driven by transportation.

We're seeing more technology in transportation, real-time transit information, real-time transportation information, vehicle location navigation.  We see more and more transportation management centers, they're migrating from the very large metropolitan areas into more midsized cities.

We see a growth of vehicle safety systems and they're marketable. 

We see a concern for transportation's impact on the environment.  How do we reduce the carbon footprint that transportation has on the environment and how do we reduce energy dependency? 

Again, performance measures comes up.  The use of performance measures and public sector decision making around transportation, there's a lot of interest in performance measures, a lot of research.  TRB has all kinds of studies going on about performance measures.  One of the big dilemmas with using performance measures is the lack of data to create them and to drive them.

Telework, telecommuting, much more of that today than when I started, certainly, in the workforce.

Those are some of the trends that we talked about, and we sat down, and we said, "Okay, how do they overlap?"  And what we though were going to be those, kind of small overlapping circles, really began to converge with a lot of overlap.  In fact, it was very difficult to pull them apart, and what we began to see.  What we've got on this chart are just some of the summaries of some of those converging trends at a very high level, the connectivity of information, global economy, the rapid technology advances, the funding difficulties in the public-private roles, security, environmental sustainability, the growing congestion, and the marketability of safety.

That's how we summarized it, that's what we thought.  I leave it there and turn it over to you all.

Joyce Bader:  So, after absorbing a great deal of information, we're going to be iteratively going through our content discussion today and really pulling out the creativity of the group.  I think it was Buzz Paaswell yesterday, on the panel said, "In order to address something like the JPO, ITS issue, it is informed vision," so this first piece is about what are the crucial trends that set the context for us as we begin to look at what will be the role of this program.

I would like to just open the floor to discussion, if these trends are the core trends to you, what you would emphasize or deemphasize.  I will look for that, and then also, even the nature of them, if there's some level of thinking we're missing here.  And so we'll just have an open discussion at this point about the trends, and I just invite you to jump in, and I will facilitate the discussion as we go along, and we'll be capturing them.

Okay, comments about the trends.  Do these represent a good summary to you?  Are they useful?  Are there things you would emphasize more, or deemphasize? Yes, Bob?

Robert Denaro:  First of all, I think it was good.  Was this the result of a workshop, Shelley?

Shelley Row:  We did it a couple of different ways.  We had a couple of different meetings with the Joint Program Office staff, and we also did interviews, the same questions we asked you all, with our modal partners within the building.

Robert Denaro:  So, first of all, a couple of comments. I would underscore the aging population and maybe I'm becoming a part of that, but I heard a comment a few years that said the baby-boomers are not aging gracefully.  And what they were saying is, we're going to gyms, we retire and go climb Kilimanjaro, and so forth.  I think the implication for transportation is, they're not going to get out of cars, they're not going to give up their cars, and yet, their skills are going to diminish, as every generation has.  So, I just wanted to underscore that.  And the baby-boomers, being such a big population, that's going to have an impact, I believe.

The young tech connected -- and you have it in here -- virtual personal network.  I really want to underscore that.  I've observed, in my case, there's this thing going on that I don't understand and I don't if the rest of you relate to it, but my kids don't have to know so much themselves, because they're in this network and they can always, at the click of a button, get the answer from somebody else.  And it's just so natural and so different than the way I live and the rest of us live, and that expectation will be in the cars also.  And in fact, that is an opportunity because it says how you can sell to these kind of people, how do you get them to adopt technology and so forth.  So I would like to underscore that.

I didn't see an emphasis here on globalization, and what I mean by that -- there it is, the global economy, but I spent a lot of time in Europe and I see a lot happening in the automotive industry in Europe, and there are some stark differences in what's happening in this country.  And what is important about that, is they will not stay in Europe, those differences, that will very quickly migrate to the U.S. and there will be more homogeneous treatment. 

And we can talk more about that being a part, anyhow, a part of that is government support for safety and technology, how much they're working together with their auto manufacturers and systems suppliers and so forth.  It's having an impact.  It's surprising to me how it's having an impact, and that will have an impact over here.

And the last comment is, I didn't see anything explicitly about the price of oil, but I think between that and greening and the expectations, I think that will have an increasing impact on what's important to people and what the government's going to be expected to help with, and what we're overall going to be expected to implement.

Joyce Bader:  Thank you.

Joseph Sussman:  While the economy is certainly global, a number of things I've observed is, competition is more on a regional scale.  You can go to Europe, but competition is on regionally-scaled industries and intellectual capital, recognizing the implications for ITS, is that gives us the possibility of managing transportation at that scale. 

Joyce Bader:  To be able to think about it in that way.

John Worthington:  Somewhat similar to that, and I don't know if it's a trend or an impediment, would be the vertical nature of regulatory institutions.

Joyce Bader:  Please say a little more.

John Worthington:  Well, actually when we're talking about competition, a lot of times competition is regional because the regulations that we, as an industry, are building are vertical.  They're dictated by a country.  There isn't universality, for example, of spectrum usage for a particular application.

Joyce Bader:  So in terms of trends, it's bigger than the public-private roles, it's how these things are segmented.

John Worthington:  We want to look at, if you want to look at something at the highest level, you have to have institutional support at the highest level.

Scott Belcher:  There's also cultural differences that create impediments.  We have certain expectations in the United States that won't be imposed on us that other parts of the world don't face.

Ken Button:  This is partly global and partly national.  One thing that I think is an important trend right now, actually the mobility of factors.  Just to cite what I mean, the United Kingdom allowed down barriers that brought in 500,000 workers, that is quite a large percentage, that imposed consumer strains on the transport cities where they moved to and so on and so forth.

In this country they have trends of migration coming in, but they also have a different form of migration, short-term migration.  In the past we've seen the unitary family sort of split up and children leaving home early.  So increasingly, I think in this country, getting husbands and wives or spouses and other spouses splitting, one working part-time in one place, one another.  And one sees it around the Dulles Corridor area, where we have people coming in Monday morning, going back to their spouse in California and vice versa. 

And so I think this is important when you look at the immigration statistics in this country, this is not simply for people moving to the job, it's also to visit their family, because people migrate for different periods.  Forty percent of the air traffic in this country is actually carrying people to see their friends and families.

Now, as the population spreads out for work and other reasons, that is going to impose an interesting challenge on how they're going to move around in their destination positions.  Are they going to have a car at both ends?  What are they going to do?  I mean, there's a lot of interesting movement of that type taking place.

Joseph Averkamp:  The one trend that I would want some discussion is marketability of safety.  It's not clear to me that it is truly marketable, and people have an expectation that the brakes will work.  And so it seems like it's almost an inherent attribute that people expect of their transportation, so if we mean marketable, something represented as a value that is true, but I don't know about the charge, whether it has a price value.

Joyce Bader:  What does the group think the trend is with safety then?  Let flush that out a little bit.

John Worthington:  I think there's more awareness of it.

Joyce Bader:  More awareness of the safety?

John Worthington:  For example, Volvo is trying to differentiate based on safety, but you don't need a premium pricing for it, the people are aware of it, they expect it.  The expectation is that the vehicle is going to have airbags and ABS, and the automakers is going to continue to invest, but I don't think the public is going to pay for it.

Scott Belcher:  A lot of automakers differentiate their high-end products through safety.  If you look at some of the high-end Honda stuff that has been part of what makes the cut, is the safety attributes.

Tomiji Sugimoto:  The industry has to lead for what is more suitable, but finally, we depend upon the cost or on the price itself, so how to trade-off the benefit and the payment.

Michael Replogle:  I do think, certainly, the global context of public policy and transportation, there's a movement in the safety arena toward zero death as a goal.  And I think it is one that certainly is an aspirational goal that we ought to be advancing.  And I think people are showing a huge propensity to spend increasing shares of their income and affluence on health and quality of life, and safety is an aspect of that.  And I think there is a question of translating that aspiration on the part of individuals into, how can they realize this through purchasing some of these technologies, or having the governments invest in public policies that help to yield those collectively.

The thing I'd really like to focus on beyond that, is the broader issue of health and environmental sustainability.  And I think the presentation underplays the importance of that immerging issue.  One of the international scientific panels looking at climate change just issued their latest report in this past month, which has quite the most alarming findings yet, in suggesting that all of the -- what we're seeing in real-world measurements of climate change is at the outer edges of what the scientists had feared.  We might be needing to anticipate, and these changes are coming faster than the scientific world had previously anticipated.

The previous report said this latest one again confirmed that we need to be looking at 80 percent reductions from 1990 levels in CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 if we are to avoid the most catastrophic kinds of scenarios for climate change, which really take us out beyond the realm of what we can predict, and certainly plan and manage for.  And getting 80 percent reductions in the transportation sector, and I note that the transportation sector, if you look at well to reel emissions from the transportation, it's about 43 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, come from transportation, if you count refining and the vehicle use and disposal of a part of that. 

And the only way we will meet those 80 percent reduction numbers by 2050, is through a combination of three key areas.  One is reducing the carbon content of fuels.  The second is increasing vehicle fuel economy.  And the third is reducing the amount of miles driven.  And ITS has a major role to play, potentially in all three of these areas, by getting better information to consumers, to shippers, and businesses about the emission impacts.

Joyce Bader:  So I hear that the emphasis on environmental sustainability is important, and health is an important thing to bear in mind.  I want to get back -- hold that -- and go back to safety for a minute, because I think we were still in that flow, too.

Greer Woodruff:  I wanted to give a perspective from the commercial motor vehicle perspective.  I think we have a difference in consumer acceptance of safety and willingness to pay for safety versus a commercial motor vehicle willingness to pay for it, so I think we could see the commercial market for heavy vehicles being more accepting and place greater value on safety technologies.  And that is, ultimately, going to come down to a cost-benefit analysis to justify that expense. 

And one of the things we see as a challenge for an individual company using the cost-benefit model, is how do we incorporate into that model the societal benefits government looks at, the holistic view of it, and says, "Well, we're going to reduce this many deaths," and places a value on that.  That does not typically find it's way into an individual company's cost-benefit model, and that's where government has to come in and have a policy, a tax policy or some type of incentive to drive those decisions. 

And then I think we may see -- we may see some competing things in the consumer market.  If a consumer is going to purchase a vehicle or have to pay for increasing transportation costs and I'm going to be environmentally sensitive and I'm concerned about safety.  Am I going to make some trade-offs?  Am I going to say, "Well, I'm more emotionally driven by environmental issues, therefore I'm not willing to pay for safety." 

Or we might find the opposite, as the environmental issue seems to be taking a front seat, will that tend to push safety issues backward.  And I think people do expect to have safety, but they're not always willing to pay for it.  And that may be where we can get a mandate or some aspects of the safety features on vehicles, so that consumers don’t necessarily have that choice.

But a couple of observations on safety, generically, all of the evidence suggests as income rises, people are more concerned about safety.  That's generic across any kind of safety, vehicle, car, transportation, gadgets in kitchens, whatever you're using.  So I think as society's income rises, they simply start moving towards a zero tolerance of accidents and so on and so forth, and that becomes increasingly more difficult, because we tend to get more and more and transport all the time.  So the safety standards, in fact, have to go up faster than the actual growth in transportation.

Secondly, there's two aspects, we've got the first aspect of what can I do about safety and what can society or equipment do to enhance safety?  And there's a lot of evidence that societies have different approaches toward safety.  For example, in my country where I come from, England, we put a lot of emphasis on driver training.  We believe the individual driving the vehicle has a responsibility to drive safely, to avoid accidents. 

If I might say, that's manifestly not the case in the United States, where one relies upon government control of equipment and the hardware, which is being provided.  And so, there's a number of ways of trying to look at safety in terms of exactly who is responsible?  Is it a State responsibility in the wider set or is it a personal responsibility, which may involve driving, and may also involve purchasing equipment.  And this does also lead to the issue of insurance in these markets, whether insurance is provided by the State or privately.

Randall Iwasaki:  In the area of safety, for California, we've done an analysis of the accidents on the State highway system and the interstate system in California, and about 90 percent of all the cause of accidents, when you look at a Venn diagram of three circles, one being infrastructure, one being driver, and one being the vehicle.  About 12 percent attribute, the causes are attributed to the vehicle, about 34 percent to the infrastructure, about 92 percent to the driver behavior, yet when you look at all of the research that is being done, we spend a lot of money, about the $200, $300 million a year in California correcting the State highway system where we can.

We spend very, very little on driver behavior, and the vehicles are getting, there's nothing unsafe about a vehicle.  I mean, so it is the driver, yet we're not focusing on the driver.  And so, I think where Joe is headed, you look at marketability of safety, it is really not -- it is high on my radar screen, because I can get sued -- Cal Trans gets sued all the time, but it's really not a marketable kind of thing.

We have a goal that AASHTO has adopted of one fatal per 100 million vehicle miles.  We're below that on the interstate system, it's the rural areas where we're above that, and so we focus in on that.  But I'm not sure -- it would be nice to have a zero fatality throughout the United States, but if you look at the trends, they're actually starting to rise.

Joyce Bader:  Does ITS, do you think that behavior is a key trend within the safety, hat understanding the role of that?

Randall Iwasaki:  Absolutely.  I think driver control, CICAS, the efforts we're doing, the crashes at intersections -- crashless intersections, that's all going to be coming down in the future, but you have to have the willpower to implement the CICAS technology.

Robert Denaro:  I have some comments on safety also, and what's been said.  First of all, I completely agree, people won't pay for safety as an option.  We can't order that option, but simultaneously, there's an interesting trend that I haven't seen in past years, where the automakers and system vendors are investing in safety voluntarily, and they usually -- automakers don’t want to put anything in a car that's going to raise the cost of the car, for a very good reason, yet I'm seeing the opposite.  Right now there's a great deal of investment there, so there's kind of an alignment between the government, what the government would want and what we should have in terms of safety, and what the automakers are doing.  So that's a positive trend.

Secondly, I think we have to be careful about assumptions, about whether safety will stall or not. I think something is changing.  It's my opinion, but I think technologies are coming along right now do have the promise of cars that can't crash or at least a lot less likely, and avoiding crashes.  And I think it's going to make a difference.  It's different than occupant protection, it's different than emergency call after a crash, that sort of thing.  It's really avoiding that.  And I think it is possible. 

And the analogy I use and when I've given speeches on this subject is rumble strips.  I found some statistics about rumble strips, where in New York and Pennsylvania, they saw a 70 percent reduction in cars running off the road accidents after they installed rumble strips.  Delaware saw a 90 percent reduction in head-on accidents with the rumble strips.  And you can put electronic rumble strips in cars right now.

Those kind -- if those kinds of statistics are real and those can happen -- by the way, on rural roads.  If we have a particular model or line of automobile, that statistics come back, and we have metrics to measure the statistics, come back and say, "Gee, this particular has -- pick a number -- 55 percent fewer crashes than others of its class."  That's going to be a huge change in the market perception of what's happening.

And I think that is a possibility.  That is why I believe that DOT made this investment in electronic stability control.  The numbers were real, and it is really having an impact.  And we haven't yet seen those numbers, the overall trend head down, but I do believe that will happen and that will change the perception of the market about safety.

Steve Albert:  One of the things I think we're seeing from a safety standpoint, from the real perspective is we are seeing safety problems solved in rural areas, but it may not have a good benefit-cost ratio because the solutions you want to put in there take more money because there is no communication and no power.  And it is difficult to do it, given the low volume, so it's almost like some policy or incentive needs to be modified improve safety in rural areas, when it may not make sense from a benefit-cost standpoint.

Second, it seems that most of these solutions related to rural and safety have been predominantly infrastructure-based.  And in fact, 90 percent of the problem is still driver behavior, but we're not putting enough emphasis on driver behavior.  That then may help the benefit-cost ratio.

If I could make a comment on converging trends, one thing we're seeing also on converging trends, that I don't see up here, is the shrinking workforce.  And generally, within administrative attitude, that when you have technology, you should be able to do more with less.  In fact, what we're seeing is more technology with even less people.  It seems to be pulling the workforce apart.

Thomas Lambert:  I want to build off of that.  From an operations perspective, it's not just the transportation workforce, but you're expanding the role of multiple disciplines participating and operating transportation systems.  We talked yesterday about the capacity-building of transportation professionals.  I think we're going to have to expand that to include changing the professional capacity of law enforcement, emergency responders, public safety.  The best way to mess up a transportation network is to let a police officer get on the street. 

So if you want to not let that happen with all of the advances in technology, they've got to understand the role they play in that.  Quite frankly, how it meets their agenda and the role they're trying to play, from their personal priorities, their personal safety priorities.  There's been a lot of good work on traffic instant management, and I think that's going to have to be expanded to include the arterial systems that have not historically been brought into an integrated approach. 

I think as you see security expanding -- and I agree with the discussion -- we're finding more and more people are willing to accept camera systems, intelligent surveillance, and you're going to see more and more of that driving, I think at least in the public transit field.  If you want to make people be comfortable in making a choice decision of leaving their automobile and going to a multi-modal, multi-person conveyance system, they've got to make sure that it's safe.  If they don't perceive it to be safe, they're not going to make that choice or decision. 

So I think it's going to drive that, and in driving that, there are many more players that have to participate.  So the leveraging of the technology, the leveraging that ITS technology can bring, becomes more of a challenge, and how that leveraging impacts all of these players that have to participate in this process.  So I think that's a growing trend, and that workforce is also having some impacts.  I think Steve's right on target with that.

Ann Flemer:  One other trend in metropolitan areas, is the move toward more compact development and walkable neighborhoods, and the trend toward pedestrian safety.  I know the emphasis on this group is on technology and the vehicle, but I think what we're see too, is the need to be much smarter about how we impact the safety of pedestrians, bicycles, and others especially as land use patterns change and we bring more people in conflict with the vehicle potentially on our streets and roads.  And certainly it is a metropolitan issue, but I would expect that this kind of thing and trend would occur nationwide.

Joyce Bader:  The trend is toward the communities.

Ann Flemer:  I didn't really see that pop out as a land use change.  And policies are starting to be driven in that direction, and we need to keep up with that.  A number of fatalities in California are related to pedestrians, not just vehicles.

Joyce Bader:  Not just in sustainable communities, but safe sustainable communities.

Ann Flemer:  That's right, because again, if they perceive them as safe, if there's technology built in to help them cross the road safely.

Joyce Bader:  Okay.  Just a question.  I've been looking at this and we've touched on most of these, but some -- look at the ones we haven't touched on as much.  We haven't emphasized the connectivity, the rapid technological advances.  I'm just taking a quick glance, I'm just curious what you think.

Thomas Lambert:  I'll give my reactions on rapid technological advances.  Safety has to be a part of that.  We tried to put together a regional traffic safety program.  The public is really not -- kind of go back to a comment that Randy made -- doesn't jump to the plate to say safety is foremost in their mind, because I think they have a view that it's always somebody else's problem. 

But when you talk about congestion, that is where they're at.  What can you do to help me not be stuck in traffic?  What can you do to help my vehicle get me there more quickly, more reliably? 

And I think what the safety message has to be, it's got to be brought under that whole congestion issue, that if you reduce accidents, you improve congestion mitigation.  So as you couch it, I think it is very important how we're communicating that. 

Greer Woodruff:  But statistically, I find that interesting because all the work I've seen says, the more congestion you have, the fewer pedestrian accidents you have because people are -- the vehicles are moving more slowly.  I mean, your problem with incidents in this country, certainly around here if I may say so, is the fact that if you have an incident of some sort, it causes congestion because vehicles are left on the road.  In most parts of the world, if there's an incident and the vehicle is movable, if you don't move it after the incident, you're in jail for obstructing the traffic flow.

Thomas Lambert:  That's one of the institutional challenges we face in this country, but the pedestrian one is a serious one.  Again, if I can refer back to the U.K. where there's a lot more urbanization, the rates of traffic accidents are gradually coming down, except for pedestrian accidents in cities which are going up.  There's a major problem, and it's very difficult to tackle, and is one which clearly -- the experience is actually, the pedestrian is often to blame.  If you put in crossing facilities, if you give them rights of way in certain circumstances, they tend to ignore them.  And that is an educational issues, and again, I'm not quite sure how IT actually gets into that, other than providing some form of education for the user of the system.

Randall Iwasaki:  I don't think he's talking just about pedestrians.

Ken Button:  I was trying to tie the traffic in.

Thomas Lambert:  But, I agree with you.

Joyce Bader:  What you're saying is the congestion and safety need to converge?

Thomas Lambert:  I think that they have to converge, because they go hand-in-hand.

Thomas Lambert:  I just say you have to be careful about things.  Only about 15 percent of traffic congestion is caused by accidents, the rest are called by bottle-neck events and sort of predictable things.  So, I agree, it is a subset of it, but we shouldn't lose sight of the main problem, in most metropolitan areas it is congestion.  It really is impacting and changing, kind of, the way that people live, and the commute times, and they're obviously stressed an a lot of other things. 

So, when you think about what ITS is set up to address, congestion has to be, sort of, at the top of the list.

Michael Replogle:  But there's a couple of countervailing considerations.  One is that as the society has shifted, more of the traffic from slower speed urban grid network grids to higher speed motor ways, limited access roadways, it tends to result in much longer trip lengths, more vehicle miles of travel, more energy consumption, even though the rate of consumption per mile traveled goes down, the rate of accidents per mile traveled goes down, the number of miles traveled keeps going up at a faster pace, causing us to basically consume a lot more. 

And we put the productivity gains in our transportation system into higher mobility, and I think as we shift into a world in which greenhouse gas emissions now, that equation is one that will end up playing an important role in decided -- is ITS helping to solve our big challenge on the environment, or is it going to be contributing to making the problem worse by spurring more mobility?  If we use automated highway system technologies to double the capacity of our current interstate highway system without managing the increase in mobility that that would cause, by reducing the generalized cost of travel, we're in trouble on the greenhouse gas side.

And similarly, if we fail to use ITS technologies to manage the flow of traffic in urban networks, we could rob our communities of opportunities to walk and bike safely, so the likelihood of serious injury at 20 miles an hour is very low with a pedestrian car accident, but the likelihood of death or serious injury goes up ten-fold when you go 40 miles an hour, and it's even higher at higher levels. 

These are tradeoffs that, I think, we need to make more explicit as we talk through what are the implications of different application pathways for ITS technology.

Randall Iwasaki:  Maybe another trend is the movement of people from the interior to the coastlines, and the ability, then, to provide transportation to those people, because it takes a long time to build a road.

Steve Albert:  You know, one of those things that we see in rural America, because of this migration is a whole different expectation by the population.  And that when you see this migration happening, they're coming to areas where you think there is this connectivity where everything is connected, and in fact, we don't even have wireless coverage outside of an interstate to provide that connectivity.  So, there's this huge imbalance between expectation levels over here, with urban dwellers coming to rural areas, and the communication coverage that allows them for that connectivity.  I think that is a trend.

Joyce Bader:  Where would you put this in here, as a freestanding thing?

Steve Albert:  It's probably somewhere where you talk about customers and expectations.

Joyce Bader:  Those are the changes in rural America. So, I'm curious about, are there any things here you would deemphasize or add?

Joseph Averkamp:  I think with respect to connectivity, information everywhere and rapid technological advances, we are kind of takers there.  That's going to happen, I think, if we're going to be able to impact that and reap the benefit of that. 

If I were to add an area that I don't see represented, I think it's growing institutional distrust with the government, with big companies.  If they get access to our data, they keep hearing about identity theft, will it be used for enforcement, as opposed to just through-put.

Having just launched the services on the phones, now we know where you are with your phone.  There are all sorts of firewalls to prevent that from getting in the hands of the wrong people.  I mean, growing institutional distrust may be a way to characterize it.

Ann Flemer:  I think to marry that up with the next generation, I think there's far less distress as they move into kind of an expectation that their information is shared and is so open, that the protection of their own identity is an issue.

John Worthington:  I would say I hope that's the case, but I agree with Joe.  One of those things technology -- if anything -- we're held back by the distrust, we're held back by the public's distaste for their information, that somehow we're going to be able to track their E-ZPass.  We sure as heck are going to have a very difficult time finding out whether or not you went over here or over there at 2:35 on the 18th -- it's not a technological issue, it's a public acceptance issue.

Joyce Bader:  Just a last question -- security really hasn't come up, or it's come up much more in the vein of safety, or enhancing safety, as opposed to national security and the role ITS could play, in terms of facilitating transportation -- is that a key trend?  Or you don't think it is a key trend?

Thomas Lambert:  I think it's very much a key trend, you're looking at ITS as to how to evacuate communities is extremely important, and as the system continues to build-out, the opportunities to leverage off of the communications capabilities, the information-sharing capabilities -- there's a lot of opportunity there.  And I think you're going to see how more and more people can use leveraged systems to save public dollars that are already very tight.  So, I think you will see more and more of that.

I think you've got some additional players that are not playing right now, that have to come into that, and we'll ultimately see where that goes.

Greer Woodruff:  I think there's a lot of security issues with regards to the movement of freight into the United States, particularly around the ports.  And even outside of the United States, to have the technologies necessary to process all of the cargo coming in.

Ken Button:  I think, it seems to me there's one overriding trench which is taking place, and that's public discussion about the role of the public and private sector and virtually everything these days, ranging through the role of information confidentiality, with the role that the public sector should play.  The global economy, to what extent clearly, the macro-level we should have greater frequent trade, or lesser restrictions on freedom of trade, rapid technology advances, which ones are going to be in the public sector or the private sector. 

My flight back from Manheim yesterday, I was just finishing Howard Greenspan's book, where he made the extremely pertinent observation that in India the cell phone is considered so trivial and unimportant, it was left to the private sector, therefore everyone's got it.

On the other hand, electricity was considered so important, it's such a national significance, it was given to state authorities.  As a result, only half of the population have it, and then only intermittently.  There's serious discussions about where the public and private sector come see and in terms of technology, financing, obviously, security, the role of -- quite clearly -- the State can't provide.  And what the private sector does, what role markets play, oil prices go up, basically, size goes down, but mobility remains the same.

Environmental sustainability -- how much of the personal responsibility and how much is State responsibility?  Congestion, ditto -- how much is private responsibility to gain information, the public sector control infrastructure provided.  And finally, the marketability and safety, how much is it the responsibility of the insurance companies get these technologies in place?  Because if they are, you can have good -- save accidents, it saves insurance costs, and insurance companies will give discounts, if they're available.  And so, I think there is an issue, an overriding issue is really where the boundary lines, or the roles of those groups are.

Joyce Bader:  Well, let's see where we are, a couple of flying contents, I could take a flying leap, but a summary and you could react to it, and that would be dangerous.  But let me see, first, if there are final comments about -- have we pretty much gone over the territory?

Michael Replogle:  Let me throw out one more trend, which is I think the increasing emphasis that we're likely to see in the next transportation bill on performance and making sure that funding and flows of money -- whether it's public funding or private remuneration under concession agreements, or other contractual arrangements, is tied to actually delivery performance for customers, for communities, for society.

Joyce Bader:  Well, just to sort of put a bit of a summary out, and you tell me if I'm way off or help us summarize or pull it together -- there was some things that are already up here, that had a great deal of emphasis in the discussion, I think, and I'll highlight some of the things that we did emphasize.

Some of the things, like they are new, they should be here, and some that might be sort of super-ordinate.

The overemphasis seemed to settle in on the safety.  There was quite a bit of discussion on that, and a lot of the points on the environmental sustainability and health and sustainable communities and safe communities.  The emphasis of what the predictions of what could happen -- those were the areas that I heard having the most emphasis.  Although some, perhaps, are just -- we're so accustomed to, such as growing congestion and technological advances, we didn't talk about them as much.

In terms of new, I heard quite a bit about the demographic shifts and a wide variety of them -- whether it was the aging population and its behavior, or the youth population and its behavior, the mobilization of the workforce, migration, settlement and how that affects things, the shrinking workforce, there were a lot of demographical shift elements that came up in the discussion.

There was also, in terms of new, the issue -- a few different slices of the regional competition, the verticality and the cultural diversity of the markets.

And another new one that came up is, I don't know how to quite put it, Tom, you brought it up -- at the professional capacity of the players, the human resource requirements, the need to leverage that.

And then there was some sort of super-ordinate things -- the public/private entities and their relationship to each other, across the board, the interplay of the trends with each other, and what that creates, and the performance measures, cutting across all -- those are some of the things I'd just try to pick up as a broad brush.  I won't go through them and ask you, did I miss something or did we miss something.

Does that inform the discussion of the trends as we go further today?

Scott Belcher:  I think super-ordinate, or some of the things we didn't talk about that we spent time talking about yesterday, that's the growing congestion.  Ubiquitous technology is changing quickly, and it's everywhere.  We didn't spend a lot of time talking about that today, but we spent a lot of time on it yesterday.  It's kind of a given.

Robert Denaro:  Just one thing, and I don't think it's a major trend, but I didn't hear it come up, and this may be related to the connectedness thing, but this whole idea about the open source and things like that, the fact that particularly, this next generation is creating their own networks, and own information sources, and so forth, and it's like they don't need anybody to do it for them -- it's kind of an open thing, and with the numbers and the statistics, it kind of works.

I'm not sure about the impact on that, but these markets will emerge, kind of on their own, and they don't need help, particularly I'm thinking now about the information trends and things like that.

Joyce Bader:  Okay, great discussion.  Thank you. Why don't we take a 20-minute break, and we'll start again at about 9:25.

(Recess.)

Vision: What Does Success Look Like?

Shelley Row:  Let's go ahead and get started again.

Okay, well thanks for a good discussion on the trends, hopefully it's kind of gotten you into thinking about what is going on in the world, and how it potentially impacts on what we can and ought to be doing.

Now, we're going to move on to kind of flipping the trends discussion on its head and saying let's talk about the vision.  And this is what would see in the world if ITS were wildly successful?  So, I would ask you to think very broadly, very creatively, very optimistically about what we would see, what would the world look like with a fabulously successful ITS?

And I said yesterday, too, we want to "go wishing."  So, we had a lot of fun doing this, I hope you'll find it as engaging and as energizing as we did.

But, again, I'm going to share with you some of the discussions that came out of the DOT staff, but please, this is just raw discussions, and we want to hear what you all have to say.

What we said with the staff was, okay, what would we see in the world, if ITS were wildly successful?  And one of those things they said was that you would see everything you need to know about any trip you want to take -- that global connectivity, that wireless information everywhere, that no matter what kind of trip you wanted, what your lifestyle choice was, wherever you wanted to go, however you wanted to get there, you would have complete information about your entire trip -- about what the roadway looks like, about what the transit network looks like, about what parking is, about what the weather conditions are -- anything you wanted to know about your trip would be fully informed, and that we even had -- we had staff who said, "Well, you know, I live in a rural area, and I want to live in a rural area, thank you very much, so I want to know what is on my driving trip."

And we have other staff who live in the city who don't own vehicles, and they said, "Well that's my choice, and that's how I want to live, but I still want to know everything I need to know about how to get where I'm going, whenever I want to get there, through all mode choices."  So, that's the first thing they went wishing for.

The other thing is, we wanted to have a transportation network that was managed for optimal performance, the whole network -- all the modes, all inter-modally, everything was managed for optimal performance, not just a freeway network.  We wanted, we saw in our wildly successful world, performance measures that support outcome-based decision making.

So, for example, we would have complete information about the transportation network, again, all modes of it, all aspects of it, from which we could make better-informed decisions about infrastructure investments, about land use, that actually didn't make it on this slide -- it is supposed to be there, I just missed it -- about where the maintenance needs to be, about how the performance of the network is.  But we could make truly informed decisions, because we had complete information.  We would have seamless collection and dissemination of transportation-related information.

Other things that we would see in the world is that everyone would have technology-enabled safety in their vehicles -- not just people who could buy high-end vehicles -- but everyone would enjoy the benefits of technology-enabled safety in their vehicles.  That vehicles would be situationally aware, that they would know what was going on around them -- whether it was an infrastructure issue, whether it was another vehicle, whether it was a pedestrian, that the vehicle would be situationally aware, so, wrapped in information, so to speak, and then also be able to communicate that information in an appropriate way with the driver.

In our perfect world -- or maybe not perfect, but just our wildly successful world -- we would have end-to-end freight movement that's seamless and secure through technology-enabled activity, and that as we've talked about here already, the technology in transportation would reduce the negative impact of transportation on the environment, by improving system performance, by improving driver decision making, and there's any number of ways that technology can improve and reduce the negative impact on the environment.

So, there were a lot of other things we wished for, but those were some of the ones that kind of rose to the surface in our wish list. I offer them to you, just simply to start your discussion and your wish list.

Joyce Bader:  Okay, we're going to try to put both slides up in a minute so you can see them as we talk.  This was the result of a process with the DOT staff that really generated a brainstormed large vision, and then was collapsed into some of these key items -- it is a work in progress, so you're now entering into it as a part of that process.

I'd be curious, before we start, maybe reacting to the specifics that Shelley said, for you to think in visionary terms, and I'm sure that all of you do that for your organizations at some point, and the work you're doing goes to some direction, so I'd like to hear from that perspective, the kind of visions you have.

Joseph Sussman:  I'm struck by the fact that many of these are quite good -- I was struck by the fact, though, that they all deal directly with the transportation system, as opposed to thinking about societal changes enabled by the transportation improvements.

So, going to the next layer out, and saying, how is the world changed as a result of the success in ITS?  I'm an educator, I would think in terms of how might this change, this ITS change higher education and transportation and engineering.

Joyce Bader:  So what would you say?

Joseph Sussman:  Well, I think we're already seeing it, of course, that the kind of requirements that one has for students forces us to think more inter-modally, more technology in what we teach -- teaching about institutional change as far as transformation.  So, we are already beginning to see those kinds of changes, the educational institutions, but it would be interesting to hear people from the public and private sector opine about how change are being forced, or enabled by a potential success in ITS?

Robert Denaro:  Just an overall comment.  I think this is a good start to see the process, how it boiled down to this.  But, with all due respect, I'm not inspired by this list.  And when you have a vision statement, I would like to, in fact, I would challenge us to come up with some things that are more inspirational. 

And, when I've been interviewed, one of the comments I made was, I just heard recently, talking to a friend at Volvo car, they have a 25-year vision, which first of all, is really cool.  Not many people risk a 25-year vision, and in 25-year vision was, no one will be killed in or by a Volvo car.  That just gave me chills.  That was really a neat inspirational statement. And so, I would challenge us to kind of think in that direction.

Joyce Bader:  So breaking through this, to the out of the box thinking and the optimistic possibilities where we constantly talk about the challenges we're facing?

Joseph Sussman:  That's exactly right.  One ought to think about the societal implications, and not simply transportation implications.

Joyce Bader:  So, let's go for that, let's talk about societal implications as you work in each of your organizations -- what are the kind of end-states you've imagined that you contribute to?  That you're all in this industry at some point, what would some of your thoughts be?

Robert Denaro:  Kind of a strange term, but the concept of loss goes out of our vocabulary.  There's just not possible to have loss.  To get lost.

[Laughter.]

Michael Replogle:  I think this certainly opens up, and I would agree with the comment, that I think these are sort of one level down from the vision or the consumer vision, and I think a big challenge for government, though, is to think about the implications of this question for how we govern and operate transportation networks and services.  And I think we end up evolving, really, towards, say, managed public utility approach, where we have a network of networks, and mobility service providers, who operated and manage the system for performance.  And where the role of government in and public sector agencies is transformed from that of the operator of the system to that of the system regulator.

And then sort of the high-level entity that sets the performance goals for the operations of the networks and the services, and helps to give voice to the collective aspiration of the customers, who will also give voice to that through the marketplace. 

The performance outcomes, then, that it enables are safety, radical reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, very sharp reduction in air pollution hot spots that cause a lot of adverse public health problems.  A much wider array of travel choices for customers.  And I think one of those things that I think right now inhibits travel choice, is this idea of a much more seamless information flow.

When I travel to some city on business, right now I end up renting a car, because I know my chain of travel won't be broken that way.  Whereas, if I have to take public transport, just one missing link of information about how I can make that journey reliably, breaks the whole chain, and forces me into car dependence.  ITS could help break that, or make the chain work.

Joyce Bader:  Okay, and as you do this, think about end-states, societal visions that are inspiring.  So, government would be at this level because you want voice to the collective aspirations, or what would be even a further end-state of that. What would be the change that would really be essential?

Michael Replogle:  A government that actually managed and takes a role in the transportation system, that actually gets to deliver good performance rather than just sort of running a bunch of streets and a bunch of transit networks that deliver, often, substandard performance.

John Worthington:  I would characterize it as our transportation system as a whole system, as recognized as a national asset, a strategic differentiator in the world.  It's the most secure, it is the safest, and it is the most efficient in the world.

Joyce Bader:  Are you saying it's become that?  Or it already is?

John Worthington:  No, it needs to be that, and in order to do that, you have to view it as not secondary.  You invest in it.  And not on a piecemeal basis.

Joyce Bader:  Say more about that, "not on a piecemeal basis."

John Worthington:  Well, I think it is a comment on the way we fund ITS.  More and more earmarks, we don't have a national policy, we have a bunch of pork-barrel spending in transportation.

Joyce Bader:  So, the good side of that is we do have a national policy.

Thomas Lambert:  I was going to say, a lot of these things, whether it be safety, it's all about better quality of life, it's less time spent in congestion, it's getting to where you want to go, more time with family, less stress -- a lot of these just boil down to a better quality of life.

Ken Button:  I haven't got a clue what society is going to want in 25 or 30 years time.  I look back 25 or 30 years and certainly I can't envisage what we have now.  it seems to me, what you have to ask yourself in transport is, basically, transport is essentially an impediment for doing things we want to do.  We want to go to the theater, getting there is transport, therefore transport is an impediment to the system. 

So, my vision would be that ITS contributes to transportation, less of an impediment for society realizing the things that it really wants to do.

John Worthington:  I have to respond to that.  I think it is a facilitator for what we want to do.

Ken Button:  But, as a facilitator, we want to minimize the actual facilitation, the fact that you have to facilitate is an impediment itself.

Randall Iwasaki:  We could always bring the play to you, if you have the money.

Michael Replogle:  To the degree that that mobility has externality costs that we're not bringing to bear, it is also spinning off a lot of ill effects, so that, incorporating those costs more fully into consumption of mobility, drive different changes in society where you don't have to travel as much to accomplish what we need and want in life.

Steve Albert:  The vision statement is very much geared toward operations, so far, and I know in many of the rural ITS outreach workshops that I've done across the country, what we hear from the rural community is that really, transportation is the hook to kind of bring people together, it is kind of a means to an end.  There's a lot of ancillary things that transportation brings, which is economic -- economic development, jobs, et cetera, but it seems to me as part of a vision statement, we should have something about the economy, and not just predominantly about operations.

Joyce Bader:  You want to go beyond efficiency and productivity, because that did show up in various things.  What would it be?  What's the picture, really, of the economy?

Steve Albert:  And that kind of sparks what John was saying, is that transportation is really a national asset.

Ann Flemer:  We're embarking, in our region, on a 25-year plan, and you have to have a vision first, and so there were basically three main categories for us -- one was the environment, driving down greenhouse gas emissions X percent below 1990 levels, whatever, fill in the blank.

Joyce Bader:  How much was it?

Ann Flemer:  In our case, it was 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2035.

Second had to do with the economy, and that was vehicle hours of delay -- how much time people are spending in congestion today, and we drive that down by X percent.  And I won't say the amount, or where we landed on that.

And the third was on the issue of equity and affordability, and the issue there was driving down the percent of household income spend on transportation and housing, because the two are so linked by keeping it below 20 or 25 percent of household income.  So irrespective of how much you earn, the percentage that you have to spend on transportation and housing would be limited.

Now, what was interesting about that analysis is the transportation solutions only got you so far to those targets, whether they're high technology or not, we operated the system better -- it only gets us a certain percent toward our goal. 

So, what I think we need to think about in this vision statement is the role of transportation and the role of ITS relative to the larger societal goals, and that it isn't only a transportation solution, but the integration of transportation technology and transportation policy to environmental policy and land use policy has to be a part of the solution.  And the stovepiping of ITS and transportation away from impeding the integration into the other policies, and funding programs, I think, is one of our biggest non-visionary situations we're in today.

Joyce Bader:  So, does part of the vision include integrating these things into other policy decisions?

Ann Flemer:  Yes.

Shelley Row:  Joyce, could I make a comment, too?  I'm observing the discussion, and I wanted to just offer a thought for you all, because this is not clear to me which way we need to go.

The discussion that we had with the staff, and that we have started with you, was not about what was the vision statement.  It was about, what does success look like, what do you see in the world?  That indicates that we've achieved the vision.  It sounds, maybe, like it's the same thing, but it really isn't. 

I find, to get these big statements that are so general, that it's very difficult to have anything tangible behind it, and that's why we changed the question from, what is the vision statement, to what does success look like, specifically, what are you seeing in the world that is different and what are you seeing in the world that indicates that we are successful?  And that, at least we found that to be kind of an insightful way to help us drive more specificity and a deeper level of understanding.  So, I offer that for your consideration.

Ann Flemer:  That's exactly why we establish targets, because unless you can articulate that jointly as a region or a nation, you don't really know what you're shooting for.

Joyce Bader:  I see one thing going on -- this is more a transportation vision than this is the societal vision.  And with some looking at how it's a societal vision in relation to transportation, the group seemed to jump right to here.  That is what I heard at the beginning.  So one thing we could do is attempt to relate this -- I'm not sure, Shelley, if you would go there.

Shelley Row:  I'm not suggesting that.  My concern is that if we came out of the discussion and said, "We have the best transportation system in the world," I find very little usefulness in that statement, to actually then, drive us to the next level.  That, quite frankly, would be my concern.

Joyce Bader:  It sort of helps you to step into what it looks like, transportation-wise.

Shelley Row:  It doesn't have to be what transportation looks like -- what society looks like.  What do our consumers see?  What do our travelers see?  What do we see as we're living our lives?  What do we see if we're wildly successful?

Ken Button:  The problem with this is it's a moving target.  Aspirations are really what we're talking about, whether you're achieving aspirations, those aspirations in society change quite significantly over time.  We know what a -- aspire to have a laptop computer 20 years ago, we all aspire to have one, the question is, what are we actually aspiring to, to have a laptop computer?  If you're in the telecommunications industry, we could have some target of penetration -- are we talking about access to the communications information world?  Is the aspiration one or the other?  There's always a strategic/operational division in that.

We have aspirations, also, very quite considerably of groups within society.  We talked about America having the best transport system in the world, I can point to large parts of the world where the bike transportation system is far, far better.  Someplace like Melbourne totally swamps the transportation system in U.S. cities, and ITS is infinitely better.  So, at the micro-level there are instances, so it's very, very difficult to judge.

And I think if you're going to judge, you have to think in terms of short term -- sort of what society, what we think are the current social aspirations and how they're likely to be attained or achieved or not, over the 15 years.  And try to think forward about longer-term trends in society -- it's quite clear there are longer-term trends in society -- the so-called embedded institutional economics where people want their freedom.  At the same time, they also want a greater degree of integration between individuals.  Those are conflicting goals, so I think one has to have sort of a rolling set of visions, not simply one for 25 years, and not necessarily one for a particular group.

Because as you pointed out earlier, several times, different people in society have got different aspirations and different goals.  So, it's extremely difficult to do.

Alfred Foxx:  I think it's how you word the statement, and I go back to what Mr. Denaro said when he heard the vision statement on the companies that said, "We're going to do this," and I'll just use "We're going to eliminate accidents in the United States."  That is a vision statement, now, how do you go about doing that?  You set yourself some targets, and that is, most of the places, organizations I've participated in, that have had vision statements, they were going to reduce accidents by 15 percent, and I think that just focused them, just particularly on accidents.  And, as everything is focused on that.

But, a vision statement ought to be broad enough -- I won't say broad enough -- but be broad, so that you can bring in the social/economic side, you can bring in the transportation side, and try to establish goals and objectives to achieve that vision.

But, you know when you achieve that vision, why we're going to eliminate over 20, 30 years, so what's the measure of success?  You either eliminated it or you didn't.  And I think it's how you word your vision statement, is to outline whether or not you're going to achieve success, goals and objectives help you get there.

Joyce Bader:  I think there's a couple of things that I would see going on that might help us.

One is, to talk a bit about the time span we're talking about, as well.  Because, we can be very aspirational, and as Ken is saying, maybe very out of touch if we look too far forward, but to short, kind of, keeps you bound to what you presently know.

And I think that, Shelley, do you have a sense of the timetable we would want to address in this?

Shelley Row:  Well, when we were doing our internal thinking, we were thinking in terms of the span over the next, of course, it is the Federal government, we do reauthorizations, and authorizations, we were thinking in terms of the span over 1 to 2 cycles of legislation, so that is 6, 12, 15 years, all up in that time period.

Michael Replogle:  I think that kind of timeframe commends itself to looking at the kind of question that Ken just raised, looking at other cities and countries around the world who are sort of at the cutting edge of using these technologies, and are well more advanced than the United States and what are the aspects that we see in some of these best practices around the world that we ought to be seeking to adapt and incorporate as a part of our aspiration and vision for where we could go with this.

And I would toss out, for example, Singapore as a city that, to my mind, is one city that is doing this better than any in the world, that is probably Singapore, which is bringing together a whole host of different kinds of technologies and pricing incentive structures that apply to every stage of motor vehicle, operation and use, in order to make a system that works well.  They use tolled transponder toll rates by hour of the week, every three months, based upon whether the arterial roads and the motorways and the areas of the city are operating above or below their peak performance, productivity and speed targets.  The decision is out of the public process, and more of technocratic, how do you manage the system for peak productivity question.  And it delivers results, and delivers a lot of revenue which goes into the general fund, and helps not just the public transport and system, but also social housing investments.  So, you don't see slum housing with a lot of decayed infrastructure in Singapore, you see a city system that works very effectively and efficiently.

There are certainly not every aspect that that would want to be incorporated into the U.S., but if there were certain things we've learned from those models, adapting and saying how could we make our cities work more effectively, how could we deliver better mobility with a smaller carbon and environmental footprint.

Joseph Sussman:  Let me try a few things, pulling together some ideas, and perhaps adding some, again, trying to draw the boundary line further out, but nonetheless in response to what Shelley is saying, trying to relate it to the kinds of things that we can work, perhaps more effectively measure.

I came up with several, one would be a more reasonable and effective balance between transportation operations and capital expenditures.  The balance would be addressed with operations getting more of the pie, or a bigger piece of the pie.

Second would be a more effective set of institutional structures, public partnerships, that is the relationships between the Feds, the States and localities, and PQ, of public/private partnerships, that we've established a more effective partnership, if you will, between the public and private sector in transportation.

I would say a steady flow of excellent transportation professionals from our academic institutions, replenishing the intellectual capital power of the transportation enterprise, and a final one I would have is to, in a sense, put ourselves out of business.  That, to me, a sign of success would be, if we don't explicitly talk about ITS that ITS is so inherently part of the transportation field that we don't feel the need to separate it out and protect it, and encapsulate it, it's inherently what we do. So, I put those on the table as several things that, 20 years from now, if those were true, I would say we have been successful. 

Joyce Bader:  Interestingly, these are operationally based.

Joseph Sussman:  We know if it's happening.

Joyce Bader:  Other comments?

Robert Denaro:  I was struggling with Shelley's comment earlier about what is success?  So, the vision I have, related to the safety thing was that cars that can't crash, there's a measurable outcome over time that says what we see is a significant, whatever that is, 10 percent reduction in fatalities and injury rates, uninterrupted, year after year and so forth.  So, I'm struggling with something around that area or that concept.

Joseph Averkamp:  I actually liked the way Ann described it about improving the quality of life and then focusing on three areas, which are how much money you're spending, how much time you're spending and the impact on the environment.  The only thing that I would maybe add to that is you really need to consider what Bob is talking about, which is death and injury and damage to property.  This may be a fourth category I would consider, in addition to those three, improving our performance in those categories.

Joyce Bader:  So, you would say that that improves the vision, with those benchmarks?

Joseph Averkamp:  Yes.

Joseph Sussman:  This is the classic definition of sustainability and the balance of economic development, which brought -- minimizing environmental impact, and achieving social equity.  So, that fits in with the rhetoric, but in a very effective way.

Joyce Bader:  I'm curious about process here, go ahead.

Ken Button:  If I could just say something -- if you actually go to have some method of assessment, you've also got to put in, economy is the dismal side, but you also have to put in constraints, we can put all the resources in the world in, and have an absolutely safe car, but there's a cost endured elsewhere, not just in transportation, but in other parts of the economy and social structure.  So, when you have a vision statement, or an assessment procedure, which is what you're really talking about, the assessment is, are we doing this, given the constraints that are confronting us?  I think it's very nice to these things like the large number of transport professionals, but having a nuclear physicist and how many nurses are you not training?  I mean, those are constraint issues here -- any sort of an assessment procedure must be, we want to attain this, and it's subject to these constraints.

I think it is important to build that into the discussion, because otherwise we're really assuming this is a sort of boundless world, and it's not.

Joseph Averkamp:  Maybe that's where the discussion goes next, this has all been blue sky, so far.

Joyce Bader:  The next piece is the opportunities that the situation presents, and the barriers.  So just -- and I'm curious to try something in terms of blue sky, because we've had lots of different perspectives and points of views, and like Shelley said, the staff did this, and sort of go wishing, what you would wish to see in 15 years that would be distinctively different, and I'm wondering if it wouldn't help, rather than to continue to discuss, as a large group, to have each person really do some of what Joe was just doing -- here's his four bullets, this is done, you've achieved the vision, I'm curious from each of your perspectives what that is, and if you're willing to take a few minutes and note those three or four bullets that, from your perspective, are the vision that would represent success for the society in relation to this topic area.

And then we'll listen to each of you, and see if we have a better sense of, do we have some kind of aggregate blue sky where we can move into the real world of constraints and opportunities from that, so are people willing to do that?   We've been hearing these things fly around, what represents to you the three or four top bullet points on the vision, and we will record those and then have a sense of the group.

Okay, why don't you take a few minutes and you can stretch, even while you do it, the room is so small, stretch and in about five minutes we'll come back and listen to everyone in the room on that, how is that?

Michael Replogle:  And our timetable for this vision is the 12 to 15 years?

Joyce Bader:  Is the group willing to accept that?  I think we're not flying quite out to 25.

Ken Button:  I was doing what Shelley was talking about, in other words, methods and assessing things -- obviously setting things we would like, more transport professionals, I'm not sure which of the two.  What you were saying was more like the first, rather than the second point.

Joseph Sussman:  Shelley talked about a wishing.

Shelley Row:  What do you wish to see in the world if we were wildly successful?

Michael Replogle:  Are we talking about specific performance outcomes that might be, in fact, measured?

Shelley Row:  Could be, I wouldn't put a constraint on yourself that it has to be a measurable thing.  I would think if you or your kids, what do you want to see in your world that would be great and wonderful when they're our age?

Joyce Bader:  It's sort of like, before we face reality, let's go to the constrainless world, where cars don't crash, then we'll narrow it down.  Does that make sense to you, Shelley?

Shelley Row:  Yes.  Does that help at all, Ken?

Ken Button:  Not really.

[Laughter.]

Shelley Row:  I love honesty.

Joyce Bader:  All right.  Greer, would like to begin?

Greer Woodruff:  Yes, I started out with the distinction between the optimization of the transportation network for the movement of freight versus the movement of people, and would encourage use to think about multi-modal optimization of steam, ship, rail and truck, moving more freight with the existing resources we have for, or minimal additional resources, and then the reduced congestion by optimization for the people transportation network, which is separate from freight transportation, but they're overlapping.  And then reduced motor vehicle accidents, injury, loss of life, contribution to congestion.  And then lastly, the reduced reliance on foreign oil or environmentally-friendly energy sources, and include improved environment.

Joyce Bader:  Just for clarity, any person can ask any question for clarity, so you have that person's point of view.  The second one was motor vehicle accidents, and say that again, reduced -- ?

Greer Woodruff:  Reduced motor vehicle accidents, loss of life, and contribution to congestion.

Joyce Bader:  That is all one?

Greer Woodruff:  That's one.

Joyce Bader:  And so contribution to congestion is a subset of reduced motor vehicle accidents?

Greer Woodruff:  Right.

Joyce Bader:  Other questions for Greer, to help you understand him?  Or anything you want to ask of him in terms of that?  Okay, Steve?

Steve Albert:  Six bullets, more geared toward ITS, but with the overarching need to have a positive transportation experience.  System, a system that protects the environment, two, assures safe movement and access, is flexible to react to demographic changes, provides for equitable distribution of funding, a system that pushes versus pulls information and enables effective operation strategies.

Joyce Bader:  Okay, questions for Steve to clarify?

Shelley Row:  What do mean by positive transportation experience?

Steve Albert:  When's the last time you heard anyone say anything positive about driving to work?  Or transportation isn't an impediment, it is not an enabler.  I think transportation needs to be an enabler in the future and ITS needs to be a big part of that.

Joyce Bader:  That was overarching.

Steve Albert:  It was one of the bullets, but basically it's overarching.

Joyce Bader:  Other questions for Steve? Okay, Joe?

Joseph Averkamp:  Well, since I already kind of sensed, since I was encapsulating earlier, to me it's a given that transportation is essential in order to transact commerce, to move goods and people, and also for us to engage in leisure.  We should seek to improve quality of life by reducing the dollars spent on transportation as a percent of total revenue, reduce the amount of unwanted delay, since occasionally Ken wants to be delayed, and gets lost, but reduce the amount of unwanted delay, reduce the impacts to the environment, and reduce death, injury and damage to property.

Joyce Bader:  Questions for Joe? Okay, everyone's clear.  Okay, your turn to go again.

Ken Button:  I have one with subheadings, and it's not frivolous.  I would like to close down institutions like the DOT.  Let me explain, this is not frivolous, I think we've moved to an era of sustainable development, as Joe pointed out, that involves sustainable political structures, societal structures, sustainable economic development and sustainable environment.

I think the stovepiping of decision making and policy making in things like transportation, energy, telecommunications and so on and so forth is totally counterproductive.  At the micro level, we've actually already seen this, because you've seen, for instance, Joe brought up the idea of training transport professionals.  These days, the biggest area of advancement in transportation has been logistics, which is not simply transportation, there's all sorts of other aspects.

Thus, as a way forward, I think we have to do that, and if we're going to get an intelligent transportation system, I have one simple objective, basically to restructure the way we make decisions about policy in general.

Joyce Bader:  Any questions for Ken?

Ann Flemer:  That's a good segue way to mind.  I think we have the political courage to set very specific targets for improvement to the environment, equity, the economy, safety that we are held accountable to at the public level, and also as a private society, that we need to be able to change policies and financing to achieve those and the courage to do that and to employ cost-effective technologies to implement those changes.

Joyce Bader:  Say the last one again?

Ann Flemer:  Whether technology is always the solution, I guessed I would question that we have to have an assessment of where technology can help us achieve those targets.

Joyce Bader:  Okay, questions for Ann?

So, I have a question for you, so if you put Ken's and Ann's together, would you say that if we do what Ken -- and I'm asking you first if we were to completely revamp our policy and decision making structure, would we be more readily able to obtain the targets?

Ken Button:  I don't know.  I think if you're going to have my vision of sustainable transport system, does require a somewhat different structure, once you've got that, you clearly have to operationalize it.  There is a target, goals, and so one -- whatever you're talking about earlier in place, but I do think that the thing I would like is actually to sit down and ask ourselves how, have we got an institutional structure here which is really geared up to an entirely different generation. 

The problem is, I think one could maybe incorporate yours and others up to a level, but I just think we need a mechanism which would put these things into play and would effectively deal with communications issues, health issues, more generally, the whole lot -- we haven't even considered the role of more transportation of moving all these diseases everywhere.  I mean, there's a whole lot of issues that overlap, we can't just micro-focus on transportation.

Joyce Bader:  Okay, thank you.  Bob?

Robert Denaro:  I have five, and since you're going to unreasonably restrict me, it's difficult to get lost.

Shelley Row:  You can say impossible.

Robert Denaro:  Cars seldomly crash, 15 years is a little short.  The third one would be expanded choices in decisions about travel.  The fourth one would be stress-free travel, and what I'm getting at there is, yeah, congestion mitigation is possible, but also my safety and trip information can make it stress-free.  And the fifth one would be environmental impact and oil use turning down.

Joyce Bader:  Okay, questions for Bob? Okay, Al?

Alfred Foxx:  Coming from a State and working there for the past six years.  I tend to think my long-range thinking is about four years, every election.  All the money is focused on that four years.  So, it was quite a stretch for me to look beyond four years, but I tried.  And to do some of the real world things, things that are facing me each and every day. 

And so, what I would like to see is, and this is pie in the sky for me, believe me, to eliminate the vehicle and pedestrian accidents through the use of technology -- I always like to say take out -- eliminate the human error element because we have -- if I did that, then I can at least reduce congestion, because that is what is causing an accident and cause congestion backups and I get phone calls in the middle of the night asking me why it is backed up.

The second one is, the other cost of congestion in the city is, when you do have an accident, people do not know the most efficient and safe route to get to where they're going.  And so there's a lot of confusion.

So, I said, through technology, provide a safe, provide safe and efficient movement of people and goods from their origination to destination.  And then, another one that bothers me because we have a lot of developers come in and they want to build all of these great monuments to themselves and it seems like the transportation network is an afterthought, and so you spending a lot of time trying to catch up, and support, because all of the big cities want the business, they want the new tax base.

So, my third bullet would be the seamless integration of the transportation network into the economic development scheme, or process.

Joyce Bader:  Is that of a metropolitan area?  Or any area?

Alfred Foxx:  Of a metropolitan area, because you had someone that was talking about the suburban area, and a suburban area, I think that's heaven -- when I drive down the roads and I see shoulders on the side of the road, and I can pull over -- in the city, if I pull over, I'm on the sidewalk and running into a building.

But, the management of traffic -- and again, in my interview, I said that was a big issue with me, the management of traffic in and out of the city is very difficult and I said that ITS -- what I'm looking for on a day-to-day basis to help me manage that, so that I can reduce the congestion, and reduce the accidents, but those three bullets are things that I need in the course of my background.

Joyce Bader:  Thank you very much. Any questions?  All right.

Thomas Lambert:  I'm going to follow something Al started, I think a lot he said, I agree with.  I want to give credit, though, to John English.  John English keeps saying we ought to be focusing on people movement, not vehicle movement.  And so, I think the one -- and I'm coming from a perspective of probably shorter than the 15 years.  If you really want to demonstrate technology applications, I think you've got to go to those systems that have fleet, so you can get them in there and move them quicker. 

I think we look at transit, look at freight, we look at rail, if you look at the incremental cost of doing some of these things based upon unit cost today, it is not significantly higher with some of the technologies that are out there now, but you've got to demonstrate that the technology is allowing people to get to where they need to go safer, more reliable, more time friendly -- and all of that has impact to the environment -- safe, sustainable communities, walking, multi-modal, all of these.  So, I think looking at that from the model, multi-modalism but looking at things where you can really get some things demonstrated quicker, and get operational quicker, I think is very important to include traffic signal systems.

Equipping transit vehicles where you can bypass intersections because you're getting priority because that bus can communicate with an intersection.  That allows travel time savings, demonstrates to the public you're going to get some value for these investments, in my view.  So, I think it gets back to managing traffic, managing people, and helping communities where people have options of choice.

The other issue is congestion pricing.  I think congestion pricing is very important, but it has got to value people that's used to ride in multiple passenger vehicles.  So, the technology has got to help us enforce that, regulate that, because I'm not aware of technology today that does that carpooling and all of that, how do you know, I think, to do it.  Toll tags are a great way to go from an enforcement standpoint, as well, but how do you give credit to someone that is carpooling, if you're going to value that, so I think there's got to be some more work done on that, and I think we've got to look at that in the shorter term, versus the longer term.

The last thing I would say is it's the whole issue of how technology is being used in instant management, whether it's freeways, arterials, how are you getting information in the hands of those folks that have to operate that system to make better real-time and informed decisions.  And it gets back to this issue of leveraging partnerships, and I think we've got to do more of that.

So, I think that I agree a lot with what Al has said, but I want to give John English credit because he's not here, and I think the challenge we've got is we've got to decide, incrementally, how are we focusing ITS technologies?  I mean, should we be taking an approach that says we can do all things for all people?  Or should we say we ought to come at this incrementally, as incrementally, we think we can start here and move along these lines.  That's a challenge we've all got, and that is not very visionary. 

So, I'm coming more from the operational day-to-day perspective and we've been taught in the public sector now that we've got to be more aligned with the private sector in doing our work, so when we look at things we look at smart objectives that are specific, they're measurable, they're attainable, they're realistic and they're time bound.  So, if we're going to do those kind of things, we've got to -- it's great having the great vision, but we ought to come back and say the practical reality is this is what we think we could do right now, and show some proof in that that leads to further opportunities.

Joyce Bader:  Okay, any questions for Tom, or comments as we go? Great, Randy?

Randall Iwasaki:  Okay, I have five measures to take, to look at.  Environmental improvement is one, I'm from California, and we're a green State and everything we do is now based on greenhouse gas reductions, all of our projects, everything we do.

One of the things we measure is reliable transportation, so efficient and reliable transportation would be a benefit.  Seamless information, transfer both from the vehicle to the infrastructure and then vice versa, back from the infrastructure back to the vehicle.  A safer transportation system -- safer and securer transportation system, and an economic benefit to, if you spend all of this money, you have to benefit society somehow.

Joyce Bader:  Okay, questions for Randy? Okay, Bryan?

Thomas Lambert:  My transportation system's not seen as a hindrance to economic development, population growth or quality of life, so basically building off of Kenneth's point.  Transportation is about getting people from point A to point B which means economic development, quality of life, and obviously we had to deal with population.

Joyce Bader:  Any questions for Bryan?  Okay.

Michael Replogle:  I guess my headline is improved mobility while reducing its environmental footprint, and the key focal point would be to have ITS play a key role in achieving the 20 percent reduction in transportation-deemed greenhouse gases below today's levels, through four key outcomes.

One is reducing VMT per capita back to 1990 levels through a combination of VMTs fees, driving insurance incentives and better travel choices.

Two, reducing congestion delays which spur greenhouse emissions, and three, spur faster replacement of old, dirty, inefficient vehicles with newer, cleaner, more fuel efficient and lower carbon vehicles through things like emission-based fees.

And then fourth, sharply increase the share of trips by walking, cycling, public transport, shared ride, and efficient inter-modal freight transport, by improving the safety, attractiveness and utility of these carbon mobility options in more places.

And then a separate vision goal from the greenhouse and environment is to simply cut accident and traffic deaths by 75 percent from today's levels, particularly focusing on safety, compliance, technology, support, taking things like Trip Sense technology that Progressive Insurance is working with to give instant feedback to drivers, and are they driving calmly or are they driving aggressively and giving some people some market incentives for that, and going beyond that in the VII program to actually support speed limit compliance, red light compliance, stop sign compliance, and such things as that, to basically give communities a new capacity to foster support, the compliance with local traffic safety laws which then make it much safer to drive and to walk and to bike.

Joyce Bader:  Okay, any questions?

Joseph Averkamp:  A question I would have for Michael is just following your discussion, it seems to me there's kind of two threats for a lot of these, and part of what ITS is information only, and part of it is for creating incentives. So, are you more focused on providing people information to make better choices or imposing sentence?

Michael Replogle:  I think it is both.  I think incentives and prices are a form of information.  And so I think we need both of these things, and people need -- people need better information about the cost of making different consumption choices, and people also need more options, more choices that are in a viable choice set -- whether they're a shipper or whether they try to get to work, or figure out how to travel to another city. 

Information plays a key role in both expanding the choice set, and in helping people to understand the full implications of those choices.

So, a big part of the question is how do we better internalize externality costs that don't get built into information that we give to people when they decide how to travel and where to travel, or how much to travel.

Joyce Bader:  Thank you, Tom.

Tomiji Sugimoto:  It is hard for me to describe my thoughts, because the creative concept in my job is confidential.

[Laughter.]

Tomiji Sugimoto:  I have been working on improving safety for a long time because -- not because I don't like my customers to die by our car, of course.  I am trying to compete, but it is very, very hard for the customer to know how much it is effective.

But the technology is just a means, so therefore, we continue, always to improve the assumptions.  Right now, I'm thinking to sort of ITS is the discussion about ITS is how to implement the infrastructure and how much we can utilize that infrastructure, but we depend upon, again, an improved campaign for the customer or the government, or I don't know, but it is providing these things, so that is a reason why we are here to discuss these issues.

But anyway, my individual perspective is coming through for safety driving, that is my simple concept.

Joyce Bader:  Questions? Okay.

Joseph Sussman:  Just turning to the question of some idea of what we think success would look like and maybe some earlier ones, just to briefly reiterate about sustainability and economic environmental equity, balancing transportation investment between operations and capital for effective institutional structures, both intragovernmentally and among levels of government and partnerships I talked about, the promotion of the steady flow of excellent transportation professionals, that do transportation professionally, which can sort of, integrates both the logistics and transportation.

And we don't think separately about ITS, it's sort of inculcated in our thinking.  So, don't have a need for that program.

I would add a couple.  One would be, how do we know we were successful if public transportation becomes a more viable player in urban areas and suburban areas and in rural areas.  By ITS concepts, the idea of routinely integrated the idea that the notion of supply chain management and regional transportation plans.  This isn't a special case of the public/private partnership.  Regional planning is typically dominated by the public sector side, supply chain management is typically dominated by the private sector side, how do we produce an integrated process?  I would argue that would be a success factor.

And then another one, looking at it in a U.S.-centric perspective.  The United States, as a world leader in providing ITS within the developing world, which is an enormous problem, that would be to me a success if it were able to be acted on, and the most effective for the marketplace -- places like Malaysia and Thailand, I should say.

Joyce Bader:  Questions for Joe? Okay, thank you, John, for being so patient.

John Worthington:  Well, I'm going to reiterate what was, where previously I got an apple pie statement that the transportation was a national asset.  I think that what we need is a 21st Century version of the interstate highway system, that really rocketed us economically.

I will add some specifics -- two to three points I made before, which are statements.  The safest would be, reduce death, fewest deaths per capita, the measurement would be per capita relative to industrialized countries.  Second, and most secure, we would have an inviolate chain of custody where every bit of freight that enters this country most efficient, and there were three subparts to that.  And you can certain add -- we've had the least cost per mile to transport freight.  And again, that would be relative to per capita. 

We would have the least time spent in congestion in urbanized areas, and lastly we would have the lowest hydrocarbon emissions per capita.

Joyce Bader:  Those are some pretty big leaps in the process.  Any comments overall on what you're hearing?

Shelley Row:  Can I throw one into the mix?  Just to give everyone a chance to talk, I'm going to kind of piggyback on what Bob said earlier, and not only in my future world am I not ever going to get lost, and not, ever going to not have a crash, but I'm never going to be left wanted for information about how transportation fulfills my life.  I'm not every going to get to the train station and not have parking, because I didn't know I didn't have parking.  I'm not ever get to the train station and not know it was late.  I'm not ever going to get in my car and discover that there was a crash on the roadway network that I didn't know about, and I'm going to have complete information, no matter however I choose to travel, whenever I choose to travel, and I'm going to have it every time I want it, no matter where I am.

That's what I'm going to have, and I'm going to have one other thing, I'm going to have a world where people like Randy and Ann have all of the information and all of the tools they need to do the job of managing and operating the network, and they're not bound and worried about how they're going to migrate to the next technology and how they're going to deal with technology evolution, and how they're going to pay for the next software upgrade, because they're smart people in the world to know how to do that in the private sector.

And all of the Randy's and the Ann's of the world are able -- and the Tom's of the world are able to just go about doing their business the best way they know how to do it, because they already have those tools, and people know how to provide the tools.

Joyce Bader:  Okay, I think the contributions were wonderful, I think we have the elements of knitting together a true 15-year vision.  But, I just would ask you momentarily to look back at the beginning.  And I don't know if it is possible, we have so many systems going, but if we can see both slides -- very good, that's amazing.

This was the beginning of the presentation.  Just take a look at it and see how, as we listen to the gestalt of what we heard, how we have shifted -- what are the major differences between what we put up and what we've been talking about?  Just, let's summarize briefly.

Any overall comments or things that you want APO to know?

Greer Woodruff:  I think a couple of us recognize there's a difference in the optimization of freight movement versus the optimization of people movement.  And different strategies will be required.

Shelley Row:  You know, it might be easy to throw a monkey wrench into the stuff we may be able to get you guys on a roll.

The biggest thing that I think I heard from the conversation that went around the room that is not very different, but it is different from what we started with.  And then I heard this very strong, this very strong voice about the need for a positive transportation experience.  And Steve, I think you started that, and then it came out all over the place, and then I heard it reflected in transportation supporting quality of life, supporting choices, supporting safe and secure travel, supporting environmental goals, but it was all about that positive experience of transportation in our society, and that is certainly super-ordinate to anything that's on these pages.

Ken Button:  I just don't know how you measure positive experience.  People complain about the airline industry, and they fly more and more.  How do you measure positive experience?  People complain, because human nature is always -- there's something better, and you can never actually provide a positive experience, you can only provide improved experience.  Because, I think ultimately, aspirations are what they are, and I think that is an important thing here. It's contextual at the moment, that's simply the way it goes.

One thing I would like to see and what I said about the U.S. DOT, the whole process should be much more effective to take into account changes in the world to adjust to environmental issues.  One measure of success is, in fact, the effects through time, across different elements of the policy building process.  And I think, in a sense, some of these come into play, but this is kind of an aggregation itself. 

I mean, maybe this is what manufacturing and industry wants, maybe it's what the Chinese importers want and the American industry doesn't want.  I don't know that sort of detail.  But, I think we have to very careful in terms of going down into detail.  Moving freight transport is great.  That's why I say, the integration of industrial policy, social policy, transportation policy.

Randall Iwasaki:  One of the problems we face as transportation officials is a positive experience, depends on where you're from.  So, if your in rural parts of California, and like my Mom, she lives in Fresno, and it takes her 25 minutes to go 25 miles, so she measures everything in miles. 

If you go to Los Angeles, that same 25 miles takes you two hours, and the only complaint I get, or we get, is that -- as the DOT, when it takes longer than two hours, two hours and fifteen minutes, we're in trouble, but as long as it's around 2 hours, we're okay.  That is why I added reliable transportation, because people tend to want to know it's going to take them two hours, they want to be able to plan for that two hours, in fact they like taking two hours, that's nice, and then smooth pavement, they want smooth pavement.

Michael Replogle:  One comment that I think is important to bring into this, is the concept of what the total system productivity is, and how efficiently it translates into delivering mobility, and at what cost. 

And so a part of the vision, I think, needs to be a high productivity system that we take, essentially, what is infrastructure management, done in silos, and transform the whole way that we approach the operations and management and delivery of services with that infrastructure to obtain a much better set of outcomes, that better satisfy all of the different stakeholders and customers in the system.

Joyce Bader:  Any further comments, thoughts, stimulators?

John Worthington:  I just think, at least for me, I'm struggling with it, having the measurable goals and kind of great feelings -- imagining what we can do.  I'm a pragmatist, I'm a businessman, I have to have a goal, I have to have something I can measure, I have to figure out how to get there.  And so that is why I tend to go towards that end of the spectrum.  I'm not sure what the expectation is, here.  What is the outcome?  I've tried to be patient, but I have to get to the bottom line.

Joyce Bader:  On that note, then okay, let me give you a sense of where we are in tracking, and then we'll take a break -- and we have been, I mean, remember, I think, in the panel discussion yesterday that it emphasized that you have to have some idea of what you're trying to create, in order to have a direction at all, or even if you should exist, in which case, maybe none of the structures we have should exist, but the direction or sense of where we're going is what we've been talking about, and I think we have a rich set of contributions here.  Now, we're going to be getting more and more practical.

And the next set is on what are the opportunities and barriers that seem apparent, and then after lunch, we will spend the entire afternoon on what does that possibly mean for the role of an institution, such as JPO -- what are the implications of that for JPO's goal in the future.  So, we're driving more and more down from the abstract to the concrete.

So, if you can bear with us on that, the next step will be the opportunities and barriers, and then so shall we take a 20-minute break? 

Thank you all very much.

(Recess.)

Opportunities and Barriers

Shelley Row:  We're going to do one more discussion before we break for lunch, as Joyce said, the entire afternoon is going to take all we've talked about, rolling it up and going into what does all of this mean in terms of implications for the future ITS program, but at this point we've talked about the big picture trends, we've talked about vision, now we want to talk a little bit about some of the opportunities as well as the barriers.

I'm going to briefly go through both opportunities and barriers, and then turn it over to you all to take us into the lunchtime.  Some of the opportunities, obviously, the whole green environmental, everything.  It is such a big deal right now, and we have just not done that much with this area, so we felt like that that was a real opportunity, that is just waiting out there, another opportunity is the leveraging the existing consumer products. 

There are consumer products like these hand-held devices, navigation systems, things that give us improved safety, convenience -- consumer products that help us feel better about our contribution to the environment.  People buy that stuff, they're will to pay for conveniences, there's a way to leverage that that seemed like an opportunity.

The growing concerns about congestion, we've talked a lot about that.  People call in and complain about congestion, is there some opportunity there, investment in transit. 

Some areas of the country people are more and more willing to ride transit and are looking for good transit options, performance measures -- there has been so much discussion in the transportation realm about performance measures, I think a couple of people have mentioned.  The Commission is looking at performance-based approaches that just seems like, again, and an enormous opportunity from an ITS perspective, encouraging visionary leaders.

There is never enough of them, is there more that we can do there that would be an opportunity?  Reauthorization is on the horizon, we see that as an opportunity to have something compelling, exciting, inspiring, I think was Bob word, to say in reauthorization.

Are there some opportunities in these creative funding mechanisms we're beginning to see emerge?  We've not talked a lot about how to connect those to ITS necessarily.  Are there some opportunities there that we haven't explored using technology to enable cost-effective and extensive data collection?  So much of what we do is driven by the availability of information and data, and yet in this information age, we are remarkably short on information.  Taking advantage of all of the technology energy and private sector environment where there's so much going on with technology, so much innovation -- it's quick, it's exciting, it's rapid -- how can we get on that bandwagon and bring it to bear for transportation?  And part of that is capitalizing on the private sector's strengths.  The private sector has an ability to leverage the market to leverage the market to reach customers, to invest in the next generation of technology, to adapt to technology.  They are skilled at that, it is part of the reason that there are markets and that there are new products and new consumer products -- how do we leverage that excitement, that creativity, that skill that exists in the private sector. 

Those were a lot of the things we saw in terms of opportunities.  Now the barriers.  No surprise that one of the barriers that everyone says is the lack of public sector funding.  We particularly see it in technology investments, a lot of times they're the first things to go.

We have -- we've talked about it here already -- the traditional view of public/private roles, we are kind of stuck in the way that we've always done business, regarding the roles that we have had traditionally in the public and private sector, and it can be a real barrier.

The other barrier that we cited that has also come up here, is this fragmentation of jurisdictions -- parochial views, stovepiping of systems, the inability to be able to see and act in a systems view of transportation.

We continue to hear there's a lack of understanding of all the benefits of ITS in terms of mobility, safety, the economy and certainly the environment.

A barrier, we put it on the barrier list, there seems to be a tacit acceptance of the high number of roadway fatalities.  There is an unbelievable number of roadway fatalities and yet you don't see people banging on the doors to say, "What is up with that?  That is unacceptable."  That is a barrier.

Again, the traditional public sector organizational structures and roles -- many of our transportation organizations grew up around building roadways.  It has been a slow, slow going to bring the operations mentality into those traditional organizational structures and role, the lack of visionary leaders, the lack of an ITS elevator speech.

We heard that a lot, that we don't have a clear, compelling, quick, out-there, gotcha message to tell, and we don't -- are not able to connect with people very well because of it. 

The last barrier we cited was this mismatch between the speed of government programs and the speed of technology evolution.  We move at an evolutionary rate and technology moves at a revolutionary rate and it is very difficult.  So, is there a way to take that and convert it into an opportunity with those who can move quicker than what the government can?

So, that's a very quick and dirty of some of the opportunities and barriers we have put down as a starting point for your discussion.

Joyce Bader:  Okay, and I -- to put this piece into the larger context, yesterday we looked at what JPO's existing role was, and it's hard to even go back to yesterday, remember the program after program -- the 9 or 10 programs.  So, you have an entity that is doing something and doing a lot of it, and doing it constantly.

What we're working on today is, what could that entity become?  One of the ways to do that is to have a vision, have a picture where you might be headed, and then look at what is preventing you from getting there, and what is helping you to get there.  And that is very important, I think this came up earlier, to look at the constraints, because sometimes they can be among the more powerful leverage points, in terms of real change.

So, this and -- I don't know if you can see the barriers, particularly, is there any way to put the four slides up?  Or is that too hard?  But, you have them on your papers there.

So, what we want you to do is look at them and see -- are we capturing critical openings and critical constraints?  Because then we will move, this afternoon, into -- if we were really to go to work on these, what would be the changed roles that would result.

Joseph Sussman:  You said something that surprised me a bit.  You said, my interpretation of what you said, is that these were opportunities and barrier for JPO?

Joyce Bader:  No, I think they are societal.

Shelley Row:  This is what we see in our broader community.

Joseph Sussman:  So this is the ITS enterprise?  Not JPO organizationally?

Joyce Bader:  No, but JPO would need to look at them. So, thoughts and comments about these?  Do they capture the situation to you?  Are they wide-reaching enough, far-reaching enough?

Scott Belcher:  One of these is a lack of communication strategy.  I think part of one of the biggest hurdles we face to penetration is educating the public and -- meaning the broader public outside of urban areas -- the public about the benefits of the technologies, so that they make those decisions to purchase when they might not otherwise.  And that's started to change public understanding, public opinions -- takes a pretty detailed strategy of how do you do that.  And it really takes a series of consecutive actions.

Joyce Bader:  So, you're saying that on the consumer behavior?

Scott Belcher:  That piece is focused on the consumer behavior.

Joyce Bader:  That topic might bear a little discussion, that did come up, that is part of what is alluded to by the "elevator speech" aspect of this, which is, we hear it all levels, consumer adoption and political will, that is two different levels of understanding of ITS.

John Worthington:  It's kind of a chicken and egg.  There is a groundswell and whatever politician wants to raise his hand on, by the same token, some realize this as the strategic opportunity that it is, could embrace that, and lack of a visionary leader, I think, is lack of political will at the end of the day any kind of government focus and a huge amount of funding.  I think you've got to have somebody who is pushing for it at the highest level.

Ken Button:  It's a bit like politicians love to be on all roads, because people can see them.  That's the problem with ITS, is it is not tangible in that sense.

John Worthington:  You have earmarks for all kinds of bricks and mortar stuff.

Ken Button:  I think there's some other things involved here, and maybe that is why there may be inertia in the public sector, besides politicians, and then ask the people who actually work in the public sector -- there is a difference between the public and private sector.  Private sector, if you're putting forward a product that doesn't work, you get kicked out.  In the public sector, it tends not to have that type of incentive for dynamism.  It is extremely difficult, and I think this is particularly problematic in transport, because a majority of people working in the transport sector and the public sector are going to take it -- city, State and Federal basically come from traditional-type engineering trends.  They're not actually concerned with transport, they're concerned with what is the concrete and steel -- the notion of actually moving something is different, and I think this is a big compliment to try and push things forward.

And I think you're absolutely right about professional training which leads into this, and leads into the public debate.  Because, if you go along with the public participant, and you read newspapers, and if you're a newspaper journalist and bring up a Department of Transportation at whatever level, I think there's a whole educational process that goes through 3 levels, actually -- the public consumer, the people at the professional levels as you like, and the politicians.

Scott Belcher:  There's one other spin on that, and with the exception of a couple of people, we're all kind of components.  There's no such thing as ITS think, we have different vendors who are interested in what they supply -- we have transit, we have freight, we have -- and ITS has its fingers in everything.  But it is not like talking about aviation.  This is a very amorphous area, and ill-defined.  It's hundreds of industries.

Robert Denaro:  This question is related to communications.  To what extent are the automobile manufacturers involved with the Department's ITS program?  What would you say about that?

Shelley Row:  Well, of course, remember the discussion yesterday on all of the different initiatives -- we are very involved with the automotive industry with three of the nine initiatives, and so we actually partner with Honda and others financially, in the development of some of that research agenda.

Robert Denaro:  Because, I think ultimately the communication -- you have to worry about the channel and how you do that, and I don't think communication is about going in, creating, you know, we did what the caravanning demo or whatever a few years ago.  It was great, and then it was done.  And how many people really, really saw that?  And, again, if I compare what I see in Europe, they have the same problem -- you could argue they're doing better with communication, but their attempts to go directly to the consumer are really, really weak.  And where it really comes about are -- we go into that showroom to buy a car, and you're seeing this technology and you're getting sold, you've just got these channels that have been created, and I think at the end of the day what's creating those channels -- they're the same channels you have making the research relevant and working with those manufacturers, and existing suppliers.  I think it's also the channel for communication, and maybe there's some creative things we're not doing that can be done along those lines.

Michael Replogle:  I think, as we talk about the barriers to applying information and communication and intelligence to transport systems and networks, it's not totally dissimilar from the challenges of reforming the healthcare sector, for example, where there are a lot of very powerful players in that sector who have vested business models, that are threatened by change.  And these technologies, if thoroughly applied, could be very disruptive of those existing business models. 

And so, just as healthcare reform has failed in the United States three or four times since the middle of the last century because of this contest between all of these powerful industry and stakeholder groups, who inhibit reform at key points when it is pushed.  We face similar kinds of structural, political barriers in the institutions that control the capital flows and the institutions that serve as gatekeepers, to overcoming some of the barriers that inhibit the application of the technology.

And so a lot of, I think, the strategy for dealing with that, inevitably then is forced into smaller scale pilot demonstrations that carve out some safe for innovation that doesn’t pose to big of a threat to the large forces in which hopefully we cultivate a garden of innovation, that then starts to sell itself and enlarge its space in the marketplace, both of the political economy and of the overall public policy sphere and market.

And so, for example, to take congestion pricing and how to -- I think one of the biggest barriers is that transportation is very ill priced, the markets don't operate effectively in a large part of the transportation marketplace and that inhibits market players from coming in an competing with real services against deeply subsidized, entrenched strategies for managing at a sub-optimal level.

But if you look at the successes, for example, of Singapore, London, Oslo, Stockholm, and a growing number of cities that have applied congestion pricing, for example, to existing three roadway networks.  At the time of implementation, two-thirds majorities of the public have opposed this innovation and the newspapers have railed and said it's going to be a great disaster.  And it's taken courageous political relationships, usually at the mayor level, to push these things through.  And once people see the results, they say it's great, we like it now.  Two-thirds majorities in London and Stockholm support congestion pricing. 

The Conservative Party Coalition that campaigned against the congestion pricing when it was coming up for referenda, in its first act in taking power from the Social Democratic Green Coalition that implemented congestion pricing in Stockholm was to decide to reinstate congestion pricing because it raises so much money and it does so much to relieve congestion and improve performance of the network. 

So I think that we really need almost a transformation, all political strategy if we are to think intelligently about how to deal with the barriers and how to overcome them.  And we need to learn from those kinds of successes we have seen in places like Stockholm and London, if we are to be successful here in the U.S. with similar kinds of innovation.

Joseph Sussman:  There's another of thinking about it.  And I thought Shelley did an excellent job yesterday of describing, I guess it's nine or ten search elements of the ITS program.  And of course, that predates your role as director of JPO.  That has been going on for a while, and I must admit as you went through it, I found myself thinking, how did we get to where we are now?  Is this the program we would have if you started with a clean blackboard and all of the money in order to structure it.  And of course we can't, but nonetheless, one might advance the current ITS program as a barrier, given all of the self-interest that exists with program managers and the like. 

So erasing the blackboard is always appealing, but it doesn't usually work in the real world.  Nonetheless, I think it is worth us coming out of this meeting with a better sense of how we got to where we are and understand whether we're happy about it or not.  And if not, what else we could do.

Randall Iwasaki:  I just wanted to say, I think one of the barriers again, is the lack of marketing or lack of understanding of what ITS can do and what has been done.  And it goes -- and like the automated highway system demo in '97, when DOT quit funding and Cal Trans kept funding the program, and it's resulted in buses that are fully automated and trucks that are fully automated.

And the thing about that is, we took that technology, that we have the fully automated running on Route 80 now, in complete white-out conditions.  So these things are happening in our State.  And I think that goes to the fact that, at least for Cal Trans' perspective, our right-of-ways have actually opened it up to innovation.

And so, in 2005, we asked for -- called for submission from many of the private sector firms that ultimately would want to come in and evaluate it.  It's a lot cheaper than going and trying to buy parcels of property to set up your technologies, than to track cars and do whatever you want to do.

So I think one of the opportunities is the State DOTs like Cal Trans, or opening up the right-of-ways to new innovations.  As long as there's benefit, in the old days you couldn't do that, today it's getting a lot easier.

And then the other thing is, as far as innovation, you know, you bash the public sector, but on the private side, they're not going to innovate if there's not money to made, versus the public sector.  We're not in it for profit, we're in it to make our system more reliable and make it safer.  And so, we'll pay for benefits that aren't necessarily money-makers for us.

So those are some of the things that I think are benefits, and also detriments to innovation.  The other thing is, you're in competition for funding.  There's only so many dollars available.  So in California, we've seized allocating money for stip-funding, that's the capacity increasing projects, because the cost for maintaining and operating the system has taken up all the dollars.  That's even after we passed the $20 billion bond issue.

Steve Albert:  A couple of points.  It seems to me that ITS so far has really just been a tweaking of the system.  We don't ever implement any full-blown strategies.  Like Randy, what you're saying, the automated highway system, what we really did is tweak the system for the most part.  We only advise, we never control.

It seems like more control-type strategies would help ITS and help to perceive the benefit of ITS, as opposed to advisory strategies.  This is more from a rural perspective, and maybe one of the issues, as a barrier of ITS for the rural perspective, has been leadership in that.  The leadership in many, not all State DOTs, but many of the rural State DOTs, predominantly people who understand construction and pavement, as opposed to technology.  And that technology has been branded as congestion relief for many of those rural States.  They say, "What does that have to do with me?  What do I need ramp metering in rural America?"

And lastly, and this kind of goes back to the tweaking, most of the ITS deployment has been fairly incremental and changes from time to time.  I mean, if you're going to do something nationwide -- and there's problems with that.  We talked about having detection monitoring on all roads, all modes, et cetera, but 80 percent of the roads are rural and we don't have any detection capability.  So we always do these incremental things and they don't have the payback that we would want.  And we're just kind of tweaking it overall.

Joyce Bader:  Other thoughts?

Ken Button:  I was stimulated by something you said.  I think there's something missing from the list, and that the fact that the private sector is made up of load-independence and more entities.  And if one makes a mistake, the others take up the slack.  While the public sector puts out the ITS initiative in place, if it doesn't work, people remember that, they see it, they note it, it's recorded.

If I can just take the simplest example, and ITS in my view is pretty broad ranging.  When I left here last meeting, I went to the metro station.  There was an announcement about train changes.  No one could hear it.  Information is given by voice sometimes, not just electronically.  The sign boards above 66, often they tell you those congestions.  I was going to say traveling 70 miles per hour, but that's illegal.  But freeway conditions, the situations where they have emergency call boxes and things for information or putting whether there's human error involves one study I did five years before anyone actually asked it.

And there are these situations where the public sector, when it does make a mistake, is noted.  A lot of ITS implementations have not been manifestly successful, and I think there's a severe barrier for carrying programs forward.  I don't think that is listed here in any way.  So there is a public perception.  Maybe people would totally disagree with me, I don't know.

Michael Replogle:  I think in general, there is a declining public confidence in public transportation providers and infrastructure managers and State DOTs to deliver performance.  And that is one of the reasons for public skepticism about increasing gas taxes and other funding sources.

It's like the drum beat has gotten a little bit tired, to say, well, we've $250 billion of unmet needs for new infrastructure expansion and give us more money.  And yet, all of the forecast are, that if we spend billions more, the congestion will still get worse, the reliability will still decline.  The people are losing faith in the product line.

And so I think one thing that ITS has the potential to deliver is a new array of services that are very much geared to performance in a quick timely way, but it is a marketing challenge.  If these services are to be introduced and delivered by the same tired old institutions that have been failing to deliver for so many decades.  The confidence isn't there and there's too much pork in the system and not enough accountability.

Thomas Lambert:  I would add to that.  The cynicism is to some degree set up because of the way the government is structured.  From the private sector point of view, as a company wanting to invest in ITS, it is absolutely impossible to work and basically deploy anything in any critical mass, because you've got to work with 50 States, at least a hundred or so regional and different operating organizations.  You've got the Federal level, everything takes five years.  And like you said, there's not performance benchmarks, there's not sort of identifiables, successes or wins that you can point to, to say this is an example of how a company can engage in a public/private partnership.  That wasn't the result of some political earmark, and you can point to the politician who pulled it off.

It is not, like you said, performance-based, it's not an even playing field, which I think has led to a lot of skepticism and a lot of folks did not invest in this when they could.

Joyce Bader:  We have a lot of barriers, don’t we?

John Worthington:  I have one more, which will be a little heretical I'm sure.  I think the standards, a lot of times at the private company are a barrier.  You talked about and Randy talked about it.  I mean, I talked to Tom about it yesterday.  We're not going to invest unless we think we can make some money.  If you have a bunch of standards that anybody can build to, basically that becomes a commodity market.  I've got other places I'm going to invest.  It's that simple. 

Like we waited around for standards, we would have invented totally electronic toll collection, which is what we did.  The only way that got from idea to implementation is a private company, a predecessor company that is part of us now, took a risk and funded it 100 percent, and said here it is, to a political entity, and said we'll take all the risks.  There will be a surcharge.  And it was a wildly successful, that that entity ended up, that the public entity's saying, "You're making too much money, we're going to take it over."

Joyce Bader:  Okay.  How about the opportunities?  It seems we gravitate toward the constraints.  You can look at it on the sheets, but are there other opportunities where there are openings that we should be paying attention to?

Robert Denaro:  I don't see it explicitly here in the opportunities, but the advances in communications and being driven, probably largely by the self-owned industry, but just where that's going.  And I think the opportunity is to make sure that the technology roadmap of ITS is matched to a reasonable technology projection roadmap of communications, to make sure at any point in time, you do the smartest thing.

Joyce Bader:  Any other thoughts on that?  Any opportunities we haven't incorporated?

Joseph Sussman:  There are two that are, in a sense, inside baseball.  But the first is, many folks around this table know, in this SAFETYA-LU, there's an enormous investment in the University transportation centers program.  Once you go around the country, some of them will establish, MIT, Texas, George Mason, and the like, others less so.  And I think a lot of them are looking for agenda.  And I think they find it as a friendly act, where the ITS folks say, "Here's some interesting things that need to get worked on."  So that's number one.

Number two -- there's been, over the last, I would say five to ten years, a pretty substantial ground swell in the area of engineering systems thinking, as a new violin to play in the traditional schools of engineering.  So again, places like MIT, George Mason, it's involved a variety of schools who are thinking more systemically about what engineering research education is about.  And many of them have recognized that in some sense, transportation has probably been ahead of the game, that transportation has been thinking in these terms, in academia at least, for the last 30 years or so.

So the notion here that there's an opportunity coming from this intellectual broadening of the engineering education framework, is potentially a very valuable area as well.

Steve Albert:  An opportunity I believe exists is leveraging the tourism industry.  If you look at most States, the second leading economic indicator for those States is tourism expenditures.  And it seems to me that since people are likely to go on recreational trips and maybe get lost or maybe not get lost, that the tourism industry would be -- and ITS could be a great partner.

Ann Flemer:  Well, the undertaking from SAFETYA-LU to establish a national commission on policy for surface transportation, it could either become a nice exercise for 20 people to sit in a room and figure it all out.  If we don’t seize the moment and the innovation that's going to come out of that group and directly influence its implementation by brining forward, what I think is going to be coming forward is the transportation is part of a larger system.  It's environmental issues, it's economy, it's dealing with demographic changes, with a 50 year vision, so it is out there.

But if that just ends up falling flat and there isn't any active effort by the ITS industry or the transportation industry, you name it, to really get behind some of the innovation, because it is coming from a group of people with very different political backgrounds, very different economic and industry backgrounds, public and private sector.  It's kind of an amalgamation of thinking that we don't often have, because we leave it to the political only.  And there will be a debate that comes forward from that group, and I think we really need to take advantage of it.

Michael Replogle:  I think there is -- there is a widespread sense that we kind of, in some ways, come to the end of the road on the wave of transportation reforms that were first put in in the ISTEA Law in 1991, which was a landmark bill, just like the 1954 legislation was, that set up the interstate highway system.  We moved into an inter-modal area with ISTEA, and I think there is a rising expectation that the next transportation bill ought to be the transition to something that really focuses on performance and that focuses on better management of the existing system, instead of simply throwing more money at building more capacity.

And there's a major barrier right now that I see, is that a lot of the expectations and the traditional transportation industry, is that we simply need to ramp up and get more money to build more stuff faster.  And to strip out and simplify the rules and the approvals and get the environmentalists out of paying attention to this stuff, so we can simply build more roads faster.  And with an emphasis on pricing, using tolling to build more roads faster.  And there's a disconnect with the economic and environmental opportunities, and the social opportunities that come from better operating and managing the existing infrastructure systems for high-performance.

And that's where I think the ITS industry has such a huge potential to play in helping adapt our traditional transportation investment approaches for the 21st century, so that we focus on better managing the whole system, including existing stuff, thinking about those operations and management strategies first, rather than last.  And thinking about those operations and management strategies before we go build new capacity, particularly as we get sensitive to greenhouse emissions.

Scott Belcher:  I think one opportunity is I would guess America as an institution where you can hold together both the public and private sector to address issues.  There aren't very many organizations that have both public and private sectors on board. 

And I think the second, somewhat self-serving, but a real opportunity, is there is in fact a world of congress on ITS, which -- the world is divided into thirds.  We don't really leverage that world congress in any way, other than to throw on a great trade show every year.  And there probably are ways to leverage it to share information and share data, to share new trends, and figure out how to take advantage of those as well.

Randall Iwasaki:  I think, just to quickly build on that, in 2005, in San Francisco -- the idea was started in 2004 in Nagoya -- but it was, sort of the public had a chance to touch and feel ITS, what it was like to talk to a car and tell the other car, that General Motors had a car that refused to crash, but I couldn't drive it fast enough.  You had to go 30 miles per hour.  There's no way I'm driving 30 miles per hour at a fixed object, but the car would stop.  And so the technology people actually got to sit in there, touch and feel, and to say I want that.

And that's the benefit of the ITS world congress.  It's too bad we don’t have more opportunities in the marketing for people to experience that.  Because I know I can't drive 30 miles per hour at a fixed object, but other people could.  Why I didn't want to do, why they'd want to do that is beyond me, but to me that's pretty slick.

Ken Button:  The opportunities are immense.  Let me tell you why.  Take the long-term view of post-second World War history and transportation in the States.  You can take the 50s and 60s and early 70s and the age of the infrastructure development, all civil engineers came in, federal highway system for example.  We then go through the period from the 70s and 80s and early 90s of deregulation of the airlines and other deregulation coming in. 

And now we get into, what I call the age of information, in the environment, because we basically have a lot of infrastructure, we can tweak it, we're not going to double or replicate the highway system.  Most of the deregulation has been tweaked, not much more is going to take place.  So, we've got the opportunity to solve our problems and the problems are different using new technologies.

And I also think there's another opportunity now -- I'm sorry to say this -- but I believe 27 percent of the U.S. civil service have reached, will reach retirement age by the year 2012, which gives me the immense opportunity, not only to replace where necessary, but also to restructure the ways in which departments function to come up with new ideas.  So there's an opportunity now to bring in new ideas.

And thirdly, I think the cycle in transportation is also replicated in other sectors, other sectors in the economy.  There's a lot of physical investment in manufacturing and so on -- in the 50s and 60s in the States -- reforming the transport and information systems, and concern for the environment.  So I think there's a lot to be said for, if you like dovetailing changes in ITS and developments in ITS and other sectors in the U.S. economy.

Now this is international as well.  I do think there's a lot to be learned elsewhere.  There's a heck of a lot to be learned within the United States as well.  I mean, the best practices across the States, which have been adopted everywhere, if you want to benchmark is really, when you've got every State in the country with the current -- actually, the metrics -- if you're on the frontier, how many States are behind the frontier, how many are in front of the frontier?  You can immediately test these things.

So I think there's immense opportunities, there's techniques for assessing how well you're succeeding.  I'm actually a lot more optimistic -- is just what you need is to hire good marketing firm and get something out there, catch phrase, a little gizmo, a little character, sell it.  That's the problem here.

Thomas Lambert:  To some degree, ITS suffers from the fact that it's too many different things, too many different people.  Even this group can't agree what's the purpose of ITS.  Ultimately, what is the goal, the catch phrase, right?  Universal healthcare coverage, everybody gets that, nobody gets ITS.

Robert Denaro:  It's a long elevator ride right now.

[Laughter.]

Joyce Bader:  I think on that note, I'm going to wrap this up.  And we've been working a long time.  We started early and there's been a tremendous amount of work.  And I think that we have really laid the foundation for the afternoon discussion very well.   When you think about it, a lot of what I've heard is, there's no question, there's a drastic need for change.  And that the JPO role can play a critical role in that.

I want you to be thinking over lunch about how you imagine change, agency to work, because we've seen this at every end in our discussion.  We've gone from the massive, we need to restructure, what the entire political system, what the interface of the political and private system too.  If we could just drive 30 miles per hour into a fixed object, the light bulbs would go off.  To the incremental day to day that Tom was saying.  If we could just get some things going.

So we've talked about a number of change strategies, and I think all of you exist in organizational worlds where you see massive change that is needed societally, that you have to decide how you're going to grapple with it, within you organization, what's your role going to be, how can it continue to succeed, and yet play a change agent role in society.  And that's we'll be looking at with JPO this afternoon.

So think about what you believe about change agency, within the public sector, and we'll bring it to the level of JPO this afternoon.

(Recess at 11:45 a.m.)

(Reconvene at 12:35 p.m.)

Implications for the Future ITS Program

Shelley Row:  We are going to start early.  We have people who are going to have to leave early.  I want to have maximum opportunity for discussion.  Unfortunately, all the people who had to go to the cafeteria will just get started on the conversation a little late.

What we're going to talk about now is really, taking everything that we have been talking about since we started yesterday, and moving it into what does all this mean and how do distill and combine and aggregate and sort out all of this information and discussion into, what are the big implications for the future of the ITS Program, and I do mean the ITS Program within the U.S. DOT.  So we're looking for those kind of few big things that we want to capture that should inform that future that program.

Now, here's what's happened in the course of discussion.  You have in your packet the thoughts that we had intended to put on the table for you.  I will tell you that those thoughts have changed somewhat since we had this conversation, so I'm not going to go through all of that.  Instead though, just so that you do have information on some of our thinking, I consolidated it into just the main bullets.  And I'm just not going to go into all the detail.  So we're printed it out here, I'm going to pass this out because I'm even going to make changes to this.  We did this this morning and I'm going to ask you to make some changes, just in pen ink, again, to inform your discussion.

Now Joyce, do you want to do this?

Joyce Bader:  Shelley's going to go over these.  These are high-level bullet points of what JPO or the ITS Program role could be, and what we're going to ask you to do, so you really have to listen, because you're going to work with these, is I'm going to ask you to do very small groups.  Because again, we move around a lot in this room, so it will be people adjacent to you.  I want you to thoroughly talk through what you make of these.  And I will give you more exact instructions.

So I just want you to know you'll be working with this and we will be looking for your point of view on the JPO role, so this is clearly a draft.

Shelley Row:  It is a draft.  Do not feel like you're constrained.  At the same time, I wanted you to have at least some of the thought we put into this is, because we did think about it, so let me just go through these as a starting point, but I'm going to tell you how I would modify them, based on some of the things that we've heard today.

The first bullet, we had originally framed as complete pervasive transportation information.  I've been talking about information on all roads, all modes, all the time, and I had a wonderful discussion about that at lunch.  I would actually recast that at this point, and say that it's about performance and that the subtext of performance is that you've got to have the data in order to be able to understand performance.  You have to have the data to optimize the network performance, to optimize decision making, whether that be land use, what management strategies you're going to choose, and then also providing information to travelers.  But I would put, the headline of that bullet to me is about the performance of the network.

The second bullet is about, we called it safety conscience vehicles, vehicles that are wrapped information, vehicles that are situationally aware, vehicles that have technology that keep them from crashing, however you to say it.  The vehicle is a smart vehicle that is encased in information.

The next bullet, I would also recast.  I would recast the next bullet in terms of reconceiving our institutional approaches.  That includes public and private partnerships, it includes rethinking the role of the public sector and the private sector.

Joseph Averkamp:  So Shelley, as we think through these, we are thinking of them in the context though, of what is the appropriate role for ITS/JPO?

Shelley Row:  Yes.

Joseph Averkamp:  It's not just ITS solely?

Shelley Row:  It is ITS/JPO.  That's a very important point and let me come back to that.

So again, I think the third bullet is more broadly framed as the institutional issues, institutional arrangements we find ourselves in, and rethinking those.

The fourth bullet I think is pretty much the same.  It was intended to be about the environmental, all the environmental issues and how ITS can play into that.

The next bullet is that we felt like that it was important to have some piece of and ITS program that really looks out, that doesn't take a, sort of a mid-term view, but really is out there scanning on what is the technology that is coming, that is really out there.  So it's kind of a long-term view of understanding what is out in the world.

The second to last bullet is about better coordination internationally.  Several of you have talked about that.  There's so much going on in Europe and Japan, China, Korea, Australia, so many leading things there.  And we have not, in my view, leveraged that to the extent that we could.

The last one is the one we were talking about most recently.  It is phrased here as raising the profile of technology in transportation.  That is that whole marketing awareness.  The kind of catch phrase I wrote down was, "Transportation technology for your quality of life," the elevator speech, so to speak.

The last thing that I did not put on this slide, but that is something that we will have to think about, and I'll just make you aware of it is, I mentioned yesterday we have a quite a number of programs that are historical, our program assessment program, our deployment tracking, our professional capacity building, our architecture and standards.  All those programs we've had for a long time for a lot of reasons.  We will, at some point, need to think about -- do we need them?  Do we keep them?  Do we continue them?  All of that kind of stuff.

Frankly, I will tell you I am less concerned about that level of detail now then I will be the next time we have this conversation.  I'm much more interested to hear your thoughts on the big buckets of high-leverage, high-value things that we ought to be talking about in this program.

Now, the last comment is to go back to Joe, what Joe said.  The context here is the Federal ITS Program.  So embedded in your thinking is the role of the Federal Government and where we play appropriately, how the Federal Government can make up for things that the market can't do.  For example, how the Federal government needs to not try to do the things that the market does better.  So keep that in mind as you're doing you're thought processes. So that's the high-level roll-up from our point of view.

Joyce Bader:  So rather than have another open discussion, which we've had lots of, we're going to ask you to do something very specific, which is, this is the role, the high-level roles that came out of the staff work that was addressing the trends, the vision, the opportunities, and barriers. 

This could represent substantial change for the ITS Program, but it is a draft at this point.  So what we're going to ask you to do, is work in some small groups and report out.  So one of you is going to need to track or report out, and we're not asking you to arrive at consensus, just a report out on the streams of thought in the group.  And it is to look at what you have in your hands, which is a draft, the draft ITS Program role, and have a discussion about looking at this and everything we've talked about in the last day and a half.  What of this would you keep? 

This is essential, this has to stay here.  As a part of the role for the program, what would you stop?  This isn't essential, it doesn't need to be an ITS role, it isn't an appropriate Federal government role.  What might you start, okay, that isn't on here, given the discussion.  And you could say I would keep this, but I would change it this way.  Okay.

So your basic report, I want, we want you to look at this and report out, "Oh, this looks great."  But I would certainly keep and emphasize this, and I would deemphasize that, or I would add this.  That's just the basic instructions.  And then if you have any other concerns or questions that come up in your discussion that you would want us to take into consideration.  And then we will have each small group report out on that so we can hear your different perspectives.  This leverages our available time and your contribution a lot more than an open discussion.

So the only way that we really have to do this physically in this room, is to group you near people where you already are, and we want the mix anyhow, and you're pretty well seated in terms of a mix.  So I'm just going to suggest we have four small groups, so you can really talk.  So we would have one from John through Tom, so the three of you are a small group.  And then this corner up here, and Tom you can stay with them, so it's four of you here, starting with Mike to Tom.

Joseph Sussman:  We have just three.

Joyce Bader:  You have just three.  And the same thing over here.  I think we will do Al through Ken, so the four of you in that corner, and somebody who may help you swing a chair around so you could actually move around.  If you can be that innovative in the transportation flow in the room.  And Joe through Greer, the three of you.

And I would like you to take, well let's see what kind of time we need.  I can check with you and we can see if you're winding down, but probably about an half an hour to 40 minutes and then we will report out.  So definitely pull in so you can see each other and talk, and I'll come around and check.  Are the instructions clear?

Joseph Averkamp:  This is it, it is not existing programs?

Joyce Bader:  Well, you know, I think, as Shelley said, these are the overarching things that would guide these.  What do you think Shelley?

Shelley Row:  It was intended to look at the future of the program.  That was the intent.  Now if you feel like you want to say something to us about the current program, then please do so.

Joyce Bader:  Like Shelley said, the next time we get together, we will take in these overarching role descriptions and drilling down into what does it mean.  If you really look at what you're presently doing, how it relates to objectives.  So, okay.  We appreciate that.  So enjoy your new found friends.  You need a reporter, the first thing you need to do as a group is pick someone who can report out on what's been said.

[Small group discussion]

Joyce Bader:  We've accumulated a lot of knowledge here the last day and a half.  To get to this I'm going to flip chart the headlines as we go, and want you to listen to each group and then get together and say are there any summary themes across the groups that we can take into our strategic planning process.  The next time, bring back to you, and Shelley will at the end of the afternoon, go over the steps that will be ensuing from this, okay.

So, shall we start over here, and we'll call this the Worthington, Sussman, Sugimoto group, thank you.

Joseph Sussman:  I'm the spokesperson for this group, but I'm sure my colleagues will speak up as well, especially since my colorant and my particular views of the system, and you will hear many of the things that the three of us as individuals have put forward.  This is sort of an attempt to synthesize into some kind of an integrated picture. 

We took the perspective of thinking about JPO organizationally, and what it should take as its organizational mission.  We didn't get into the nitty gritty of thinking about the specifics, the technologies, or the programs, but what we ought to see as -- what it ought to see as its mandate, if you will.  And so we started with John's idea, which you have heard articulate very well, the idea of the transportation system in the United States being a national asset, while enhancing quality of life, competitiveness, and the like. 

And the notion that we need in the transportation field some setting of directions in the transportation area, if you will, a "national transportation policy" for several decades if not generations.  And the notion that plausibly, ITS and JPO, as the manager of ITS, given its inherently advanced technology tone, given its inherently intermodal frame of reference, that plausibly ITS could be the lever that allows us to begin to think about how that transportation policy more broadly might be formulated, in the context of new technologies, deployment, governance, and the like.

Now that's kind of a grandiose vision of what JPO could do, but where we're thinking big at this stage.  And we think that, given that JPO exists with RITA, which under Mineta was characterized as "the Secretary's mode" that this essentially has this mandate.  So, to begin the practical work of doing this, JPO has to begin by thinking through some basic ideas. 

So the question of how JPO relates to the rest of DOT, understanding that better than we do, perhaps, here around this table, thinking through some of the fundamental functions JPO might undertake.  Is JPO a research organization or should JPO be more of a policy shop, an information gathering and educational organization?  Should they be concerned with being the coordinator of a national and international clearinghouse about technologies and deployment approaches, an organization that takes the responsibility for educating the public and for educating the political infrastructure of this country about the importance of transportation generally, and ITS in particular. 

We envisioned JPO being the collector and the synthesizer of international information about ITS, trying to learn as much as we could about what is going on in other economic and cultural settings.  And we had some interesting discussion that Tomiji brought us to, thinking about contrasting the way ITS-JPO has organized the enterprise versus the way Europe and Japan do it.  And we've got a system that is highly centralized and coordinated through JPO.  Japan has taken a more decentralized approach with various organizations, the National Police Organization, the Ministry of Post and Telecommunication, the Ministry of Transportation and the like, and it would be interesting to try to understand, as one rethinks JPO, whether that's a sensible approach.

It seemed to us very important that we look at the existing research activities of JPO.  I mentioned that my colleagues were very supportive of it.  None of us felt that if you were in fact starting from scratch, that you end up with those programs, that you would end up with a program without any environmental research at all.

So rethinking back and rethinking what that agenda should be, is quite important.  And recognizing that there's policy oriented research that could be undertaken by JPO.  The public/private partnership question, that's a researchable question.  The levels of government question, that's a researchable question.  JPO could take the lead and that's yet another level on this more general question about thinking of the transportation system as a national asset.

One thing I'll close with, to say that the group of three of us didn’t really agree fully on whether this was an appropriate way forward.  But it's worth putting on the table, recognizing this is part of -- this isn't a consensus.  The notion of JPO as a technology scanning organization, by technology scanning, I'm thinking in terms of looking out 20 or 30 years at the kinds of technologies that are being developed around the world, at the National Laboratories, at industrial laboratories, and understanding how that technology might be brought to the fore in terms of the transportation enterprise.  Perhaps ITS specifically, but plausibly, more generally.

In my experience in the transportation world, I've only come across one legitimate technology scanning activity.  And that was conducted back in the mid-90s by the Court of New York and New Jersey.  They came around and talked people all over the country.  They came to MIT and talked to me and others and tried to understand how their business might change as a result of technologies that were still very much in the incubator stage.  And this struck me as -- I guess I'm telling you, who didn't agree -- but this struck me as potentially a useful role for an organization that has made its living on technology so far, and they could extend that into that frame of reference. 

But my colleagues didn't necessarily agree that that was a valuable way forward.  So, the notion of a fundamental rethink of JPO, perhaps plausibly deemphasizing some of the research role and reemphasizing the policy role, and becoming, if you will, the technology leading edge for U.S. DOT, all focused on this idea of the transportation system as a national asset, and there's a Federal responsibility to protect it. 

You didn't give me any guidance on time, I'm lucky I didn't give my hour and a half standard lecture, but let me just see if my colleagues, Tomiji and John, had anything they would like to add to those.

John Worthington:  The only thing I would add, and he emphasized it much more capably that I could, is I concur very wholeheartedly with the policy approach emphasis, but more specifically, I think the one issue that we continue to hammer all of these institutional barriers.  The one thing that I think the Federal government can do, and has the ability to do through the way we fund things, is that they have that carrot. 

And so, to the extent that there is a need to break down the institutional barriers, the Federal government through suggestions, recommendations from the JPO, that would be mandated politically, could set up incentives so that, as opposed to in Japan or Singapore where there is a totalitarian and one guy makes the call and that's what happens.  The Federal government says you've got to do this and the OEMs have to do it.  Here we have got to use a little more persuasive approach.  So we're going to have to spread some honey around to various political entities to break down some of the institutional barriers.

Joseph Sussman:  Tomiji, is there anything you wanted to say?

Tomiji Sugimoto:  Of course.  Having a similar discussion with a high level person in the Japanese government, that is kind of an issue for me.  And so of course, the organization is quite different from the U.S. to Japan, and also the size of the country is completely different and the density of the transportation infrastructure.  So therefore, the priority has to be changed from Japan, but each Prime Minister or the department has their own responsibility and their own talent.

For example, the Japanese DOT has, they have to come up with some comfortable measure and so they also are going to capitalize their budget into the infrastructure, but with their own resources.  But the technology itself is a little bit similar to each other, whether someone is using the camera system.  And so finally, the UTMS, Universal Traffic Management System -- I don't know the agency name, that's kind of  JPO -- is trying to organize those kinds of systems to look for, to look in, to achieve something toward a safe, comfortable, and environmentally friendly movement for society.

Anyway, I don't know exactly what JPO should do, but that is a good example of any.  And if one of the issues is suitable for America, for the U.S., we should consider that.

Joyce Bader:  Thank you. So questions for this group, or clarifications you would like at this point.

Ann Flemer:  How broadly would you take the research, the policy research agenda, within just the DOT or would it get into environmental protection?

Joseph Sussman:  I think that kind of outreach is critical.  Transportation exists within that social context, and looking at it in as broad a way is politically feasible makes sense.  It goes to some of what Ken was saying earlier this morning, when he talked about the fact that to stovepipe even at the departmental level, and the best way to advance towards societal goals might be much more integrated. So my own view would be to take a very expansive look at it.

Michael Replogle:  So would it be an appropriate, for example, to pose to a policy oriented, joint program office, to ask the question, "How much of a contribution do greenhouse gas emissions could we get in the year 2020 and 2030 and 2050 from the full application and deployment of the most effective ITS strategies?"  Is that the kind policy we would pose?

Joseph Sussman:  I think that would be quite -- and a number of others -- would be quite meaningful.

The whole question of whether ITS is a plus or a minus environmentally, is still an open question.  People could argue it is a plus in the sense of smoothing out traffic flows, less stop and go.  One can argue it's a minus because, through additional capacity it attracts more tailpipes to the road.  And I'm, we're still groping on that kind of question.  I think understanding that would be a quite reasonable piece of policy research.

Joyce Bader:  Other questions or clarifications?  Okay, thank you.  That was really excellent work. Let's move on to group two in the corner.

Randall Iwasaki:  I have the honor of presenting our team's efforts.  And we took a look at all seven of the bullets, and I'll just go in order.

The first -- the question today was, to get rid of or to stop the effort -- and the first one, performance of the network.  We though we should keep that, but we should expand it into more of multi-modal -- I keep reminding everybody it's multi-modal system performance, rather than just simple network.  It's important to keep in mind the multi-modal performance measures.  And the data should result in what are the costs of maintaining, what is the cost of keeping your vehicle, all aspects of cost.  And also system information, how is the system performing, both multi-modal, highway transit, how does it interconnect.

And so it is a multi-level information kind of a system that we're taking a look at, and that also comes down to system planning as well.  What are the benefits -- and we'll use pricing, congestion pricing as the example.  Should we price the entire system or just part of the system, and what are the benefits?  So that was the first go, does anybody want to add something to that?

Michael Replogle:  I think we basically said, in addition that, that we really want to make sure that the information system is designed to deliver on a set of agendas that come out of public policy performance.  How well -- how can the system be planned to better perform, in terms of our key public policy objectives, as well as how can the system be operated for public policy objectives, as well as how can the system provide information to consumers and users of the systems, so that they can make informed decisions that help them account for the full costs.

Joyce Bader:  Go ahead, Randy.

Randall Iwasaki:  The next is safety conscience vehicles for all.  We thought JPO should stop that effort, really it's a market-driven effort and the OEMs are really taking a look and taking a lead on that, and I'm not sure how the JPO would help it, other than to stay connected with the automobile manufacturers at VII and things like that.

Okay, the next one is reconceive our institutional approaches.  And I think we, our team felt we ought to keep this effort or you ought to keep this effort, however, the procurement policies that are in place, both from the State, the Federal, the local perspectives are different, some are cumbersome, some are good.  And so maybe the role of the JPO would be to go out and do some research on what works, and then showcase those activities or those procurement processes that working, to help streamline and expedite the process.

Joseph Sussman:  Can we insert a question?

Joyce Bader:  Well, go ahead.

Joseph Sussman:  So you interpreted bullet three as having to do with procurement?

Randall Iwasaki:  Yeah, because if you have a -- think of public/private partnerships, JPO is not going to affect that, that's going to be done at a different level, the public/private partnerships that have it at the State level or the local level.  And so we looked at, one of the things, when you spend a Federal dollar, that is where they can help us, through the procurement process.

Because right now, if I federalize or if Cal Trans federalizes a project, then we have to go through all their processes, and so far, what we would rather do is spend other tax money on the project and leave the Federal money if we can on one giant project, because it's kind of a pain to go through that process.

John Worthington:  Isn't that something that can be addressed?

Randall Iwasaki:  That's the procurement, we're spending into the Federal dollar, how do you streamline that process?

Shelley Row:  Can I also ask a question?  When we wrote that bullet, we were thinking more along the policy research side, of new ways of finding different ways, so you get out of that box to start with.  Are there some -- is there some research that could be done that would look for innovative ways to recast the whole question, as part of a policy research agenda?  Did you guys talk about it?

Michael Replogle:  I just respond directly to that and to say that I think there is a role to be played in looking at how performance-based funding and performance-based contracting can be used more effectively to ensure that whoever is owning and operating and managing infrastructure for transportation services, is actually delivering, to meet the objectives that have been set for that infrastructure, operations, and management.

Right now we've got -- when you build a new road, you do an environmental impact study, it's 10-feet tall and contains a bunch of mitigation requirements and half of them don’t get implemented and nobody looks back to see, how well did that actually perform.  And it doesn't satisfy anybody in the system, the environmental community is not happy with it, the DOTs aren't happy with it, it doesn't serve the customers well. 

Why not look at strategies that, for example, could involve public/private partnerships or public/public partnerships, in which the project gets delivered, in which you better operate and manage existing infrastructure or new infrastructure to meet performance standards.  And under short-term operating concessions, you fall down, then the thing get retendered to those who will deliver better performance incentives for doing well, and penalties for doing badly.

How can we expand those models and make them work more effectively, to ensure that the public can trust then and that they're not seen as just a way of getting around the labor requirements or getting around environmental laws or public accountability and transparency.

Randall Iwasaki:  I think the answer is yes, and that is why we focused in on showcasing going out and finding what works, and then showcasing, because not everything is working.  There are some models out there that may work a lot better than we have now.

Joyce Bader:  Okay, keep going, Randy.

Randall Iwasaki:  Okay, establish ITS and environmental research agendas, we think -- thought that's a keeper.

Let me see if I can get this right, establish ITS and environmental research agenda, enlarge the focus on how ITS can deliver environmental, and then also, better understand how ITS applications can also work against environmental performance.  And so, much like when you have a cost-benefit ratio research, research the environmental benefits and you might want to partner with EPA, and this would help get you out of a silo and start partnering with other agencies to then get benefits for delivering ITS and then also helping the mitigation for the future. Anything else?

Michael Replogle:  I think we actually talked about identifying, promoting, and demonstrating modalities for ITS deployment that maximize environmental benefits.

Randall Iwasaki:  I had a big asterisk on that, but didn’t see it.  Which modalities would maximize the environmental benefits?

Okay, and then the group thought we should combine the next two and keep it.  It is a focus area for sure, and that is to go out and scan and investigate what works, but not only nationally, but internationally as well.  If we're going to look, we might as well look everywhere, and then once again, adopt -- that will lead to the adoption of best practices, that will lead to the dissemination of emerging best practices, so be a champion for those kinds of activities. Anything else?

And then to raise the profile -- we didn't think this was really worded quite right.  So with that, we though maybe build a business plan that shows deployment benefits that technology is really the focus in promoting intelligent management of existing transportation network systems, raise the profile of the real benefits.  It should be a demonstration much like UPA, those are actually projects, that once deployed, then you're the champion to show the rest of the United States if not the world how those benefits can help deal with congestion.  So it's really about demonstrating, once again you can use this identify, promote. Anything else?

Shelley Row:  Can I ask a quick question on that?  And I'm going back to a question, Steve, that you raised yesterday.  We've done demonstrations in the past, we've done model deployments, we've done iFlorida, we have done those in the past.  Is the perception that those work or if not, what would be better?

Randall Iwasaki:  In our case, we're one of the benefits of the showcase funding, from '92, '91, somewhere in that neighborhood.  And I want to tell you that it took so long to deploy this stuff, because it was so far out there, saying the communication kernel and working with the locals.  And then once we got into the demonstration projects, the focus wasn't, in my opinion, on how well the technology worked, it was more, you didn't cross the Is and cross the Ts, go back to the local agencies, gather all the receipts up, now we're in the old F&M '76 comments systems situation, where show me that you have the right documentation.  Then you've lost sight of the outcome. 

So those are some of the things that we're very cautious about, accepting the Federal money.

[Laughter.]

Randall Iwasaki:  Sometimes it is very, very arduous. 

Thomas Lambert:  I think the key issue here was not raising the prevailing technology, but the benefits you could achieve through the technology in a quantifiable way.

Michael Replogle:  And towards that end, I think, for example, the urban partnership agreement you signed with New York City, which sets out a clear performance objective that is related to the funding, saying that as a condition of this funding, New York has to come up with and approve a plan that will reduce vehicle miles of travel in Central Manhattan by 6.3 percent, and also leverage resources from tolling of existing roadway networks to finance improved bus services.  That will measurably improve transportation choices. 

Those kinds of performance-based conditions on funding, to my mind, constitute a very useful potential model that we could take into other metropolitan areas, into other kinds of intergovernmental agreements, that basically tie more of the funding to specific performance outcomes that relate to key public policy objectives.  So that the public can see what it is getting for the money, and so that there's some accountability.

Randall Iwasaki:  Plus a practitioner has to deploy those future systems, will want to know they're going to spend $158 million.

Shelley Row:  To get something out of it.

Joyce Bader:  Keep going Randy.

Randall Iwasaki:  That's it.

Joyce Bader:  So open the floor more generally to questions, comments, clarifications from this group.

Robert Denaro:  I have a question on eliminating the safety conscience vehicles because the private sector will do that.  Where do some of the programs go, like for example, the DOT got involved in mandating EOC?  I assume JPO did some work on the research on that.

Randall Iwasaki:  No, I failed to mention, we thought and it's a would, I mean, rather than have JPO do it, NHTSA would, but JPO stays connected through VII and CICAS and other initiatives.   But as far as safety conscience vehicles, that's really not their focus, at least in our opinion.

Michael Replogle:   I think this also, in many ways, is reflective of the same kind of thing we heard from the previous group, kind of shifting the emphasis of JPO a little bit away from research and more into policy.

Shelley Row:  That is helpful.

Joyce Bader:  Okay, any other questions or comments?

Robert Denaro:  My comment, by the way, is I'm not sure I would trust -- being from another sector -- I'm not sure that I would advise you to trust to do the right things.

Joyce Bader:  Let's go to the next group.

Robert Denaro:  I guess I'm the main scribe, was made the scribe, so I wouldn't talk so much.  We commented on six of the seven of them and we added two, probably.

So the first one is on the performance of the network.  One question we had was, where did congestion go and we assume it's under this one.  And not a concrete suggestion, but maybe that needs to be more conspicuous.

And then we had quite a discussion on metrics.  And in the need for metrics, and what that means really is accountability.  And the comment we had, in fact there was a statement in there about 1.7 fatalities per million miles to 1 fatality per million miles as a goal, we saw in the reading material.  But anyway, having real operational metrics like that, that you are accountable to.

Now there's some risk in signing up for that.  For example, I would say the European Commission is saying we're going to reduce fatalities by 50 percent within -- by 2011.  I think they're about 10 or 15 percent reduction right now, so they have a long way to go, but at least they signed up for something.  So coming up with relevant measures and accepting them, making the commitment and accepting the accountability.  Then also in the performance of network, measuring those metrics, but also relationship to policy also. Anybody on my team want to add to anything?

Okay, number two, safety -- safety conscience vehicles -- we said maybe it's more than just vehicles, maybe it's safety transportation, because there are infrastructure implications potentially.

The third one was reconceive institutional approaches, maybe this is just assuming part of that, but the comment of assisting local organizations to transition technology and business models.  And then, we already have the public and private as a subset of that.

Number four, establish ITS and environmental research agendas.  We suggested a change to this one, of establishing an ITS research agenda is definitely a good idea.  Environmental could be part of that, but this is where we added one.  We thought environmental considerations should be promoted to its own bullet, and maybe it's something like we say, performance of network, or we say safety conscience vehicles for all, so maybe we should say reduce consumption and emissions, or something like that.

But promoted to a bullet, as opposed to just relegating it to some research.  We need more research, but it is ready today for implementing.

Establish the next generation, ITS scanning and research strategy.  Just again, including education as a part of that, and also the concept, just the character and the concept that the research strategy has to be adaptive and flexible as strategy evolves, so making sure it's a rigid thing where you're making decisions on what some strategy is for the next three years.  And jump in, by the way, team here.

The sixth one, better coordination with international ITS research and the international ITS agenda.  On comment on that was to change it and say, not just research, international research, but also what they're doing on deployment, and for that matter, coordination with government.  The European Commission, Japan and so forth, the best practices.

We talk all the time about, gee, what must be different between the two.  Well start talking and share those practices.  Maybe there are some things that we would do that they would like to copy.  The concept of this whole framework in Europe and what they're doing there and why did they make the decisions they made and why is it going to work for them and why might that work for us too.

And then, an additional added one was seamless/integrated transportation across all modes.  And, a sub-bullet on that was people having choices, things like electronic payment and so forth comes under there.  And attacking some of those problems.  And that's similar to the inter-modal thing we heard.

Does anyone want to add anything?

Joyce Bader:  Okay.  Comments, questions for group three?  I may have missed a little bit, but can you just revisit what this one was, what we do institutionally with local.

Robert Denaro:  It's as local organization through transitioning technology and working business models, developing business models.

Joyce Bader:  Questions for group three, or comments?

Randall Iwasaki:  I have a question.  So does that mean JPO is going to develop the business models?

Ann Flemer:  I think it was the idea of sharing the practices.  We like you point Randy, that we may not want to go after Federal money because you might be constrained in a more creative approach.  Why don't we learn about what those are and incorporate them back into the Federal procurement policies or regulations.

Randall Iwasaki:  I think of business models as how do you, of how do you make money out of your projects.

Joseph Sussman:  Just so we understand what has been presented.  Group three, it seems to me, is say JPO is an ITS organization, that is what they do and that is what they should keep doing.  I'm not saying that's good or bad, I'm simply observing.

Joyce Bader:  Hold that thought, that's what I want you to be starting to do, is get to the gestalt and look at what are the themes or differences, similarities or differences.  Okay, let's go with group four, then we'll really have the whole picture.

Greer Woodruff:  First, we complete the transportation information.  We really felt like the role of the JPO would be to develop a few key measurements or benchmarks that could be used with the data.  As an example, the State to State or metro area to metro area, a limited number of metrics, such as vehicle miles traveled, mechanisms.

We also felt like their role might be to identify the sources of data that are out there, that can be used by the private sector or by researchers.  They wouldn't necessarily house that data, but be able to direct people to the available data for research and private development.

The second item, the safety conscience vehicles for all, we would modify that to recognize the market-driven forces related to vehicle features.  We do feel like they could play a role in facilitating interoperable features of the vehicle, and that the Federal government's role might be more related to the external infrastructure requirements, external to the vehicle.

And I think you can trust private business with the appropriate incentives.  As long as we are incented to do the right thing, we will do them.  I think we are short of incentives at times.

Joyce Bader:  Is that a separate bullet?

Greer Woodruff:  That's just a comment.

[Laughter.]

Greer Woodruff:  With regards to the roles of private versus public responsibilities, we would modify that one as well, and encourage JPO to create a framework for the creation of public policy as it pertains to the role of the private sector and the public sector, to help kind of flesh out what are those roles and to take a fresh look at really who should be doing what in regards to that.

 In terms of the research agenda, we believe that JPO could be engaged in, or should be engaged in helping to set the agenda.  There were some comments earlier that we thought were very good, that we could really leverage off of.  The University transportation centers, in terms of performing the research, leveraging from other research that is going on like at EPA.  Perhaps JPO would assist with securing funding for research and then selecting the research projects to be funded, but leverage off of other organizations to actually perform the research.

One item we would recommend is something we consider starting, is developing strategy to hand off the research and the proof of concept models to NHTSA or FHWA to be built out.  So how do we kind of take the successful research and move it into a performing mode.  And then how do we get appropriate penetration once it is prepared.  So maybe some facilitation of how do we move things from research to deployment.

Another item, establish a next generation ITS.  We do think there's a role to be played here, some overlaps perhaps with better coordination of the international ITS research, looking out at military applications and emerging technologies.  We feel like that's a role, perhaps, to look at forward looking organizations.  And then we also, with regards to the international ITS research, we felt like, perhaps, the development of the benchmarks I mentioned earlier, that those could be used also in benchmarking ourselves against, with international community, to determine where are we behind, where are we leaders, where are the opportunities for us to improve.

And we didn’t really address the last item, of raising the profile of technology and transportation, but I think the comments earlier of this organization, identifying the benefits and demonstrating the capabilities and technologies is certainly something we would feel is appropriate.

Joyce Bader:  Okay, questions, comments for group four?

Michael Replogle:  I really like your idea of benchmarking internationally where we are, because I think all too often we get caught up in these, sort of, boosterism, that well the U.S., we're number one.  And without recognizing that there are plenty of areas where we're not number one anymore, and we have got some things to learn, and figuring out how to package that message in a way that helps our policy makers recognize the catch-up game we have got to play would be very helpful.

Joseph Averkamp:  That was sort of a talk-off on John's point, that we have a transportation system that is the most efficient, the safest, the most secure.  In order to be able to do that, we have to decide what the important metrics are and benchmark ourselves into that to be better than other countries.

Randall Iwasaki:  I think that goes when you go to performance measures, you can figure out where you stand.

Jaye Lappin:  I think I heard you say, refer to cooperation or the to partner with defense.

Greer Woodruff:  No, I said looking at military applications and how those might be deployed in the transportation industry, but cooperation in terms of research is really referring to University transportation centers and other governmental agencies that are also involved in research, to maybe drive some of that research agenda so we have good synergies when there's overlap with research that needs to be done.

Randall Iwasaki:  I feel like the profile piece of it, we also talked about, our group talked about champion or partnering with some of the associations like ITS America or AASHTO or AFTA or ITE, ICE too.

Joyce Bader:  So now our job is, let's just look at what we have and see what we see.  What are the common themes, what are the differences?  Because that will help us really begin to shape this.  Let's to try to get an overview, this is a great amount of work and it's very interesting, and it's finally taking, where we started yesterday, in the big picture of what ITS now does.  And then in the context of all we've done today, the trends, visions, opportunities, barriers, and we're boiling it down to some potentials for the role.  Let's look at what it looks like.

Thomas Lambert:  The one thing I heard in almost every group, is moving away from pure research into performance-based, results oriented type projects and initiatives.

Joyce Bader:  So pure research, to just results-based, say that a little more specifically.

Thomas Lambert:  The results-based projects, right, with sort of demonstrable ways of getting that out into a publication.  I mean, we said it three or four different ways, in terms of, like we said, showcasing best practices and sort of setting policy directions and things like that.  But I think what most of the teams are grappling with, is how do we make it real, how do we get it into the hands and make a real impact, in terms of what the overall goals are.

Joseph Sussman:  It seems to me, at least three groups mentioned a broader definition of research as well, so policy research, not just simply technological innovation.  We tried to understand the policy implications and the institutional change that would have to take place.  But, and I have a side problem, because you almost suggest an advocacy position, which I think is slightly difficult to pursue. 

I mean, I take it to mean that once you look at, provide the research in a broader sense to look at successes and failures in terms of not just technology, as Joe was saying, in terms of ways of implementation, policy successes and failures, and so on.  I'm not particularly advocating a particular technology or particular anything else.  I mean, I'm sure JPO can't do that.

Thomas Lambert:  But certainly quantifying the results that happen in a pilot project or the environmental impact versus the system.  I think what we're struggling with is, if you look back over the history of, we'll say the last 10 or 15 years, and the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent in this area, how much of it has had demonstrable improvement in overall system performance across the country.  And it is that transition, I think we struggle with.

Ken Button:  Basically reorienting the research to looking at performance rather than the technical features of it.  I'm just trying to clarify in my mind what we're getting at.

Joyce Bader:  Other things you see that are definite themes or things different?

Ken Button:  Just a clarification.  Does JPO stay its own size or get bigger, smaller.  One could look at these things and talk about those things, but there is a resource base involved in this.  I mean, it's relatively important, rather than waste time on things which are really impossible.  What are we talking about in terms of the resource base?

Shelley Row:  At this point, I would say to not constrain yourself with that.  At this point, I don't know that we will get bigger, smaller, or what we'll do.  It's partly dependant on what the role is that comes out of this.

Joyce Bader:  Other things that we see as core themes, in terms of the ITS role?

Steve Albert:  One of the things overarching there is the recognition of the institutional relationships and barriers and opportunities, public and private.

Thomas Lambert:  I think you also look at challenges and the opportunities from a multi-modal perspective, not one size fits all.  You go in to looking at how you maximize delivery and product services, based upon the different approaches you can take.  And all the impacts that has.  So I think this whole approach toward multi-modalism and how that comes into play is extremely important.

Michael Replogle:  And I there's another thing that we did not directly speak to in any of our groups, but which, reading between the lines, I think all of the groups are working around the edges, is how do we enhance institutional capacity to absorb and apply these approaches to be more effective.

Ann Flemer:  That's at every level.

Michael Replogle:  Yes, every level of society.  But that to me is sort of an underlying theme, of where the public policy research orientation needs to focused.  Looking at what are the barriers and ways of overcoming the institutional capacity limitation.

Joseph Sussman:  Each of the groups, at various levels of politeness, suggested the need to look at the nine focus areas and to scratch our heads about whether those are really the right areas.

Joyce Bader:  As we were charting, one group said, I think yours is sort of stay and what were the big differences as you look at this.  There was a comment about, group three was really still focused on, what was that on, technology?

Joseph Sussman:  No, I think it was my comment.  I said it sounds like they're suggesting that JPO stay in the ITS box, as opposed to plausibly, as we suggested, thinking more broadly about JPO's role might be.  But, and I think that's partly true, but not completely true.  There are boundaries to what you can do, that's why I was asking the questions about the size and ambition of the JPO.  It takes a lot of resources to start bunching up, and if we're only talking about the short term ones.

Ann Flemer:  We also discussed what the broader role, could extend beyond transportation solely, and moving into other areas, not necessarily to go beyond ITS, but it could extend into a policy review on transportation matters.

Shelley Row:  What were you thinking of specifically?

Ann Flemer:  Like EPA, for example, that is a huge undertaking.

Joyce Bader:  Other observations?

Ken Button:  One thing that is missing from this, we didn't talk very much about ITS applications, but there's a whole other sector in the world which have got new technologies, which are bringing about potential improvements.  It seems to me, if you take and look at just trying to get the ITS various documentary forms deployed because other sectors like health, energy, telecommunications, and so on, they've introduced new technologies, new information systems, whatever you want, into them.  And there have been a lot of successes in doing that.

I was just wondering whether one role should be the international experiences and domestic experiences in ITS.  One ought to really look at this more generically, what ITS implementation could learn from other sectors around the world and their experiences.  Because we do tend to see transportation as special, and it's not.  We would like to think it is and many of us probably have pictures of boats and planes in our offices, but it's really not different than many other sectors.

I think of libraries, when we think of expenditures.  By definition, ITS is in a lot of these areas.

Mr. Cronin:  Shelley, to that point, old timers might remember Bill Hyman in the early '90s, did a look at really detailed, and you really have to want to know this stuff to get anything from it, but that was probably 15 years ago now.  That document was published and the world has changed dramatically.  I took a whole lot of value out of learning how these industries and issues, and there's real merit to that.

Joyce Bader:  Another question to stimulate the discussion and to look at the ITS.  Was anything surprising?  This sort of goes with Joe's comments about there's levels of politeness here, but if we let go of that a little bit, is there anything surprising as you look at this, as you go way back to the beginning of the meeting when we talked about ITS's role, and now you're looking at this.  Is there anything that surprises you?

John Worthington:  What surprises me is there's no overarching vision, there's not a national transportation policy, there's nobody steering the boat.

Joyce Bader:  And does that surprise you about JPO or just generally?

John Worthington:  Generally.

Joyce Bader:  Other people, what surprises you from the work we've done, that informs the ITS role?  Anything?

Joseph Averkamp:  In a similar vein to John's point, I think that the programmatic functions would be driven by the vision and the mission.  If you can find that, what is it we're trying to do?  We're trying to be the best in the world about safety, security, and efficiency.

John Worthington:  Then everything else flows.

Joseph Averkamp:  That drives the programmatic functions that you create.

Shelley Row:  One of the things I was going to ask the group, thinking back on some of the earlier comments.  I think it was even yesterday that someone observed, that in the current ITS program, we sort of lack a clear, single, compelling direction, a uniting direction. 

The other comment that I think came out earlier today, was some of the discussions we had were really not very inspiring.  Capturing that imagination and creating that excitement, so with those two thoughts in mind, I just wonder, from the discussion we've had, is do you see that inspiring, compelling, uniting vision coming through on some of the things we've talked about?  Is there something that is that kind of big ticket item that marches us all ahead, that sounds exciting to us?

Michael Replogle:  I guess my sense is that American society right now is adrift and it doesn't have direction at a whole lot of levels.  There's such partisanship and a lack of clarity about what our national purpose is.  You know, we're in the middle of the longest war, a war longer that World War II, and yet there's been non call for sacrifice.  And I don't want to get political about this, but I just want to put that out there, that there's a whole of disconnects that are causing individuals throughout our society and organizations throughout our society to feel a little disconnected from the reality that we're in.

The public perception that climate change is a serious problem is now over 75 percent of the population and yet, we don’t have a national climate policy, we can't an energy policy bill passed.  Congress can't get it done.  There's just a disconnect at so many levels, and we've got a lot of States struggling to make progress and working through a patchwork, but there is no good solid, cohesive national leadership that is helping us to forge a vision for where we're trying to go.

And without that clarity, I think it is no surprise to me that we're struggling to say, "Well, what's the purpose and function and vision for the transportation system or for intelligent transportation."  And I guess I think we're challenged to anticipate, perhaps, where we as a society are headed, in terms of the challenges that are likely to like ahead, so that we can position this program, this ITS program in a way that anticipates the demands that will be upon us in five years, for which I'm sure national leadership will arise, regardless of what party it comes out of, at what levels of society. 

And I would put out that climate change is going to be a big driver.  Fiscal challenges are going to be a big driver.  Economic competitiveness is going to be a big driver.  Making our transportation system more productive and efficient is going to be a key driver.  And so we need to be anticipating how can we bring this program together to help address those kinds of issues and challenges that will lie ahead as we develop the leadership.

Shelley Row:  Let me run this by the group.

Scott Belcher:  I just wanted to respond to what Michael said.  I think, without going into a detailed response, I think maybe your statement is the predecessor to the answer to what Shelley is looking for.  What is it that we can get excited about as a result of this meeting and what is it we can get excited about in ITS? 

If you boil it down and you talk -- we've talked about a lot over the last day and a half.  What you come away with is, we are facing institutional crisis, define it however you want.  And a big part of it will be transportation.  ITS is part of one of the -- part of the answer to that crisis.  We can't build our way, we can't buy our way out of it.  And so, the people around this room and the things we're talking about are a part of the solution, whoever the leaders are, wherever we're going.  And for me, I think that is an exciting aspect.

And I think the other piece that is exciting or galvanizing, and also it is fascinating to be in this room.  I mean, I've been with lots of industry groups over my career.  I don’t think I've ever been in a room with as diverse an industry group, where's there's no debate about the environmental implications.  There's no debate about whether, there's some discussion about whether it's really an additive or a takeaway from the environment, but everybody here is talking about the environment as a given, and that this has, the ITS has a role to play in it.

And so for me, to answer your question Shelley, I think those are the two kind of galvanizing things.  And the real challenge is how do you package that in a way that everybody here can say, "Yeah, I'm there."  And I'm excited about participating in it and I'm willing to do that and leave my own parochial interest to the side, because we're all pushing towards the greater good.

Shelley Row:  I heard environmental and what was the first one?

Scott Belcher:  I think the first one is, we are part of the answer.

Randall Iwasaki:  The debate about the environmental, the only thing that was brought up so far was the greenhouse gas reduction.

Scott Belcher:  But Randy, you know pollutants are a bigger deal for most, I mean, for the States right now.  And these technologies have a huge benefit to address this.

Randall Iwasaki:  But you still have to go through the environmental process, that's biological, and maybe things we don’t agree with.  But as far as greenhouse gas reduction, ITS will help that.  There's no question in my mind.

Greer Woodruff:  I think part of the challenge too, is getting people excited about it and having a national vision or strategy, is how quick people begin to see the benefits of it.  We're talking about getting people excited today for something that they're not going to see any benefit of anything for 15 years.  People are not that far-sighted, they want to see a benefit now.

So, I think we have got to think about -- while we've got that long-term vision -- what are some things we can deliver more immediately, that people can say, "Okay, that is worth my sacrifice, worth my investment."  And I think that is part of what I'm seeing a struggle with, is how do we deliver something.

Robert Denaro:  First of all, to answer your question within the framework of what we just did, I don't think this was structured in a great inspirational moment to put on the boards, but I think the seeds of inspiration are in there.  And I think just a minute ago, you sounded like, well -- we're going to -- are there two, are there three, and I think that is the right thing.  We need a small number of things, not 15 things, that are inspirational.  And I would say that the seeds that I see up there, a couple of them, and you can also say this. 

And our group said metrics, and we talked about saving lives and so forth.  And you said yourself, 42,000 deaths, we could call that an epidemic if we had a disease in this country that was causing -- killing 42,000 people, we'd be all over it.

The concept that comes in here, which might be difficult, is this implies great risk.  If we're going to go on record by saying that we're going to commit and be accountable to reduction in fatalities and injuries over a year by year basis and so forth, and do that intelligently, about when is the technology that's going to occur, and we go on record.  Then, we're also going to promoting the fact there are all these deaths occurring, we're going to be acquainting the population with the fact that this is something they should be concerned about.  There's great risk in doing that and opening yourself up.  But you might ask yourself, do we have a choice. 

So that's one area, and I would just agree with the second one on the environmental.  Environmental is an extraordinarily both, and by that I mean both emissions.  It's an extremely popular item today, but it is important.  Just because it's popular doesn't mean it's not important.  It is important and to tag onto that, I think it could become inspirational.  So I think the seeds of inspiration are there.

Shelley Row:  I was going to fly something by you guys and I don't want to oversimplify this either, but I'll just fly it by you and get a reaction.  You know when we did the history lesson yesterday, if you look at kind of the evolution of the ITS program, you can kind of start encapsulating it in a handful of words.  The first word was field testing.  That was kind of our first generation.  And then it kind of migrated to deployment, and then it migrated to integrated deployment.

And it strikes me from listening here, that I just wonder if now the next step is performance.  Because I keep hearing, and performance has a lot of layers.  It has an environmental layer, it has the metrics layer, it has the optimization, the inter-modal layer.  But it seems to me that maybe we're in the here and now of performance measurement, management, and that's kind of where we are.

Ann Flemer:  And that is linked to policy objectives, because what I think we're hearing are there are some high-level objectives of environmental congestion.  And in California, environment is huge, in the Bay area.  Equity is huge, you can't charge everybody the same price when you have a huge differential.

So as an example, but the performance measurement, I think we should take a flyer on that.  We should really work hard to figure out what is it that we really want to measure, and can ITS help us, not only measure it, but educate the public in their role of meeting the objectives because the government is not going to do it all.

Michael Replogle:  There's an old term, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it.  And I think time performance to measurement, to management, to the things that inspire people, that is where we tie it to the vision.  It's what are the things we can deliver through that chain of management, measurement, performance.  And it's got to be the things that inspire people.

Joseph Sussman:  Shelley, I think, to respond to the what's exciting idea, I think there are two different ways of thinking about that.  One is, what could be exciting to the public, and the other is, what is exciting to us as transportation professionals.  And the answers to those two questions are very different.

In terms of what's exciting to the public, although many of us see it as around the table.  I've talked about it as routine, nonetheless, the technology is exciting.  We talked in the beginning about the new kind of consumer, the 15-year-olds that know more than their parents and their grandparents about what is going on, on the internet.  The kind of technology that we're in the business of providing is something that could be exciting to that consumer, and that relates to performance.  They see performance as connected to that technology, so that's potentially a hook for the public.

As a transportation type, what I'm coming out of here more excited about is, it seems to me there can be a public/private basis for going forward to improve the transportation system.  And second, there can be an inter-modal basis for improving the transportation system.  This is maybe the only example in U.S. DOT that is not in it's modal stovepipe, and that is a potentially, extraordinarily important lever for us to consider.

Shelley Row:  Could you say a little bit more about the public/private basis, just a little bit more?

Joseph Sussman:  Well, we've typically thought about, when we first started talking about ITS in the early '90s, we noted that the vehicle infrastructure connection up to that point in time was about zero.  It was literally where their rubber met the road, that was the connection.  It wasn't electronic, it wasn't data rich, what have you, and clearly now that's changed totally. 

We've got vehicles, we've got infrastructure, we've got them talking to each other, we have the vehicles talking to each other and so on and so forth.  Public sector and private sector take different responsibilities for the infrastructure of vehicles, but it's quite clear that they have to cooperate and there is that basis for cooperation.

Shelley Row:  I see.  Okay.

Joseph Sussman:  I hear public sector around this table and private sector people around this table go through two days without having an argument about that question, and that to me is exciting.

Joyce Bader:  Maybe we should be asking what didn't we argue about.

Robert Denaro:  The private sector analogy would be the return on investment.  We started in 1991, it's about ready -- it's about time to ask where is the return, and to take one layer of politeness off, we measure deployments.  And I'm looking at, and I'm going why do I care.  I don't care about colored States on maps, because what do those deployments do that people care about or that made a difference.  And so, there's the ROI.  We have to properly define what that return is that we expect to measure.  That's where it gets tough.

Shelley Row:  We're measuring outputs instead out outcomes.

Joyce Bader:  Okay, Scott?

Scott Belcher:  I had one question about whether there is something we didn't address, that kind of reflects on what Ann said.  And that goes to social equity.  It's hard to have these discussions with the public, particularly when you talk about congestion, pricing, and you talk about not having a discussion about social equity.  And we never really talked about that at all. 

And while we're probably all smart and can figure out ways around it, and it could potentially be a red herring.  It is something, as you go forward, it's something we have to think about and talk about.

Ken Button:  I think the public policy issues are important.  Social equity is interesting, just take London.  The road pricing scheme there has had a massive benefit to the lowest income members.  They use public transport and we tend not to think of these.  We think we're charging car users.  Well, there are important people who use other transit systems.  There's a whole lot of complexities in there that we tend not to think about.

But two other observations.  One is, I like Joe's view.  His point about the public and private sector participation, because we have intelligent transportation systems here on surface transport.  Of course if we apply it to aviation, quite regularly they're moving forward to similar challenges to what we have here.  And they've actually moved quite well to get stuff in and have clear measurements of objectives, like reducing delay times, reducing fuel consumption per mile or whatever. 

So I'm not quite sure what we can actually learn, in terms of setting some of these objectives, aims, or goals.  Simply by looking at putting some close relations to what the people in this room do, but I think I would come back to Michael's point.  With all due respect -- I'm English, I can say this -- we always drift, we don’t have a problem with drifting, but America does, because it's a very heterogeneous country, a younger country, and it's a very impatient country as well. 

And at the moment, it does seem we don’t have any major objectives in this country, other than something Al Gore has sort of managed to win Oscars and Nobel Prizes for, the environment.  And the trouble with the environment, as you all know, is it can't be cured overnight.  We can get rid of pollution in a city quite quickly with tumultuous effects.  Somehow I think, when asked to latch on to some shorter term things, I don't know which they are, which society will actually appreciate and can monitor, which also lead to longer term environmental objectives.  Clearly, things like this, which not in terms of reducing greenhouse gases, but actually reducing the cost of using cars.  Because fuel prices are going up, better information -- better fuel used, information about using public transport, how much we actually save by using public transport, short-term things which you can sell to people who are very short-sighted.

We're aiming towards the longer term objectives, but to have a strategy and a sense.  But it's absolutely right, America does need a goal, it has to get to the moon, it has to destroy Germany, it has to get to the moon, it has to do something.

[Laughter.]

Michael Replogle:  I think this area of the atmospheric surround equity and the political perceptions around congestion, pricing is something that is worth some further explanation in this arena.  Because if you look at where congestion pricing has been implemented, in democratic political systems in England and Norway and Sweden, It's been done by left-wing and green parties, forces who have sought to use the proceeds to invest in public transport and environmental benefits.  And it's been sold on the basis of environmental benefits and equity.

Where congestion pricing has been implemented in the United States, it's been pushed largely by more right-wing and libertarian groups like the Reason Foundation, and supported by a number of business interests.  And it's been mostly -- most deeply suspicious for our, sort of, core new-deal democratic political constituencies, who are ascendant right now, in the leadership in the key Congressional committees.

And I think that's a real challenge for this ITS community, thinking about how do we use ITS to obtain better environmental benefits, because pricing has to be a key part of that equation.  Otherwise there's no way of managing the impacts of expanded mobility.  We can't put a price on it, on that scarce thing.  And so we have a political challenge to educate and expand the understanding of these benefits and cost trade off and how these strategies can be implemented in ways that protect and enhance equity, and that deliver benefits for low and moderate income households, who are struggling with the high-cost of transportation with rising gas prices. 

That is the real context in which we're trying to make this next leap.  And I don't have the complete answer, and I don't know that any of us in the room do, and I think that may be one of the key public policy research issues that should be on the agenda for the ITS program, is to figure out how to move forward in addressing that in America's current political context in a creative and effective way.  That isn't about just marketing, but is about delivering and showing the real results and getting some demonstrations in the right places that help tell the story to the right people, who can either be gate keepers for success or blockers for further action.

Randall Iwasaki:  I think it's important to also note, when you speak in terms of pricing or congestion pricing, that there's different tools for different, I guess, different tools for different applications or different symptoms.  So, when you talk in terms of tolling, toll roads are built and a toll is charged to pay the private sector and the public sector back for their up-front capital investment, right?

So hot lanes, you're selling capacity, excess capacity in an HOV lane, versus congestion pricing where you're trying to deal with some systematic issue in a region.  So it's important, because we just throw out tolling, that is one thing that I think that the lay person doesn't understand.  So when we throw these things out, whatever report or however we develop what we're going to move for, we need to keep cognizant of the fact that not everybody understands what we're talking about.

Summary of Outcomes

Joyce Bader:  Okay.  I think we've covered a tremendous amount of territory.  We have immense material on potential vision, the mission, and focus for the ITS program role.  It's going to take a lot of sifting through and drilling down into, to look at it in relation to the existing programs and the kind of transformation we need to move forward with. 

So I just wanted to do a check-in with the group.  Do we feel like we have pretty well covered the terrain on the discussion of the potential role?  We haven't gone back into the existing role.  We will at another time, but the potential role.  We have a pretty good summary of the discussion.

Anything anyone would want to add? Okay.  All right.  Well, I congratulate you for an exhaustive and in-depth piece of work.

Next Steps in Strategic Planning Activities

Shelley, do you want to take it from here?

Shelley Row:  Sure.

I'm looking back over my notes and, you know, let me just say a couple of words about what we're going to do with this input, and then I'll give Paul an opportunity, he wants to say something as well.

First of all, thank you very much for spending your time and your energy to share these thoughts.  We're going to take this information and start the digestion process.  There is a lot here.  I think we're going to need to assimilate it, sort it, parse it, and then try to think what specifically does it start to mean to us.  And we will be trying to put some framework around that. 

We expect to take that and then actually start crafting some words to explain what we are hearing and to what we think that the implications are.  Maybe at this level, and then maybe one level down, that we will work internally within the DOT and vet the information, share the information, et cetera, et cetera, and then have you all come back together again.  I think we're looking at the March timeframe to give us some further input into that.

I have to say, as I'm scanning my notes, and there's a few nuggets of sentences that I wrote at the time, that I think are kind of sticking with me.  It's not an exhaustive list, but I keep coming back to the notion of having a positive transportation experience, having a transportation experience that supports quality of life, that supports people's choice, expanded choice in terms of quality of life.  The stress-free travel I wrote down, focus on the movement of people, not necessarily cars.  And then so much of what we have talked about has been about the performance, the metrics, the performance measurement. 

Obviously all of the environmental impacts, I wrote down, I think it was Ken, that you said.  I don't know if you were quoting something, that we're now in the information and environment age.  So that's Ken's quote, we're in the information and environment age.  Someone else said transportation was ill-priced, and that's leading us to make sub-optimal decisions.  Someone else said that it's time for a transformational, political strategy.  Someone else -- I like this one too, it's hard to hear it -- ITS applications are not totally successful in the eyes of the public.  And we look at an exercise we still have today that says, congestion ahead.  Dare I say that we call 511 systems that have maybe sub-optimal information on them.

So even some of the things that are most visible to the public, that are ITS related, maybe have not been the most roaring success.  And there's a lot of reasons for that, but nonetheless, that's what the public sees.  Services geared to perform, it's the need to get critical mass in our fragmented communities, our fragmented structure.  It's so hard to reach critical mass, to really be able to make a difference so that the public can see it.

Anyway, those are some of the notions that I'm going to be chewing on, among some of these others.  So again, we're going to take this information, work on it, bring it back to you all, and then we will go at it at another level down, in terms of detail.

I did want to mention as well, that we have, you know, one of the things I think is important in this community, is to speak about what's going on in this community.  There is a big role and a powerful role for the bully pulpit for being out there and talking about what is going on.  We have TRB coming up, so we do intend to try to frame of this discussion, to be able to share it at TRB and to get even more discussion going.  There's a lot of value in just having the conversation.

We have the consumer electronics show, obviously we're working on our reauthorization strategies, we have ITS world congress coming up, we have any number of venues where we want to begin to talk about a big and exciting vision of the next part of ITS.  We would love to enlist you all as a part of those mouth pieces, to talk about the future of ITS, about what it can be, what it ought to be. 

I don't think we all have to be exactly singing the same words.  The fact that we're having the conversation and we're thinking big thoughts together, I think is very valuable.  So we'll be continually feeding information to you all and asking for you support to help socialize what we're talking about in your own communities.  Because we are a very diverse group, and bring all of that information back and help us craft a vision. So that's kind of where we're going.

Paul, let me turn to you and give you an opportunity.  You heard the end of the discussion.  Anything you would like to share?

Paul Brubaker:  Sure.  Well, the one thing -- I guess I missed some of the fireworks, but I deliberately stayed away.  And I've got to be honest with you, the last half hour or so, I keep sitting here, and keeping my mouth shut during that time was really a struggle, but only because I don't want to have a chilling affect on any exchange at all. 

But I will say that the one thing that I always hear the secretary talk about is, she lays out our three priorities, safety, system performance, and 21st century solutions.  And a lot of people hear that and have more questions about exactly what that means.  But I think everybody in this room is cognizant that what she's really talking about is, particularly in system performance, is how do apply technology to system performance, to measurably improve things like the velocity of the supply chain.  And that's the kind of stuff we're thinking about here. 

And I don't want to preempt this, and I'm kind of just looking around to see if there was anybody here that I really kind of needed to check with before I throw this out.  But this is something of a public meeting, but I will tell you that there is a documented draft in draft right now, that is going through the clearance process that discusses things like passenger travel and cargo and the velocity of the supply chain and innovative financing techniques and technology.  In effect, technology is more or less wedded throughout this particular document and it more or less lays out a vision of some high-level goals of what we really need to be building towards for the 21st century, and ties together the secretary's priorities and how those are integrated in a holistic way.  And I think it's going to be a very valuable publication for us to sort of look at, as we're considering the future of the ITS program.

You know, thanks for being polite, but I do, and I am curious, that if you had your choice about the nine initiatives, which ones you would put a bullet in.  I mean, I've got my opinions and I haven't been very quiet about them, have I?

Shelley Row:  No.  That's a good thing.

Paul Brubaker:  I really was kind of hoping, in the remaining time, perhaps privately we can take some gloves off and really have some hard discussions about choices and priorities going forward, and really what we need and what we want to do in the performance.

When you guys were talking about performance, something came to light, and always tuned into the supply chain issue and measuring throughput at the supply chain.  I was just down at Georgia Tech, at the UTC down there, and these folks put -- I mean this is not -- I know they're doing this at a lot of UTCs, but there is -- they put some GPS devices on some cargo containers and tracked them through the supply chain.  And it was really, really interesting to see the bottle-necks.

And I'm thinking to myself, okay, that's a great baseline.  So let's say we apply some -- and I don't know what the technologies are -- but apply some technologies to helping alleviate the bottle-necks or laying some concrete or some rail or what have you, but begin to measure the velocity through the supply chain in a meaningful way and a measure actually commuting time and the technology exists to do that today.

What's frustrating is the retail side of it.  And I heard some comments made about the need to start deploying some things today, and absolutely spot on.  I've been pressuring our folks to be thinking more in terms of modular approaches, the rolling out of these technologies so that we can have some retail victories, if you will, so that the public can see the value.

And I'll just give you a prime example.  Today, for example, personal experience -- going out to lunch and in Tyson's Corner, I was on 66th, there was a construction project.  As I'm passing the sign going over the Roosevelt Bridge, I see it says, "HOV only between the hours of six and nine," or whatever the time is, but it said nothing about the construction up ahead, which I found really irritating, especially after I was late for my lunch.

But it's not uncommon and it's fairly common that we experience that everywhere.  And I was looking at Randy's statistics on the I-80 congestion, which I guess is the most congested little strip of highway in the Bay area, but not in California.  But just the thought of sitting in that traffic and what do we do to relieve that.  We get on something that is known to people, you see the signs for 511 all over the place.  So, we got on 511, on our cell phone, which really probably you're not supposed to do when you're behind the wheel of a car, and it's very unsatisfying.  So the retail level really needs a lot of attention and we need some quick wins going forward and that is how, I suspect, we're going to be structuring that program going forward.

I would like to get some quick retail wins before we roll out of here, but with 419 days left -- but who's counting -- we don't have a lot of time, from a political appointee perspective, but we're going to get some things done. 

And I think Michael was right when your discussion about leadership.  I mean, fundamentally, all of this stuff, in my view, always comes down to leadership.  It comes down, it is the leadership there, and are they willing to paint a clear vision.  And you're Americans, we do need goals, no doubt about it.  And thanks for taking on than Hitler goal a few years ago.

[Laughter.]

Paul Brubaker:  We were able to take that and help you out.  That was good teamwork.  You guys did a lot before we got there, but we do appreciate that.

But at any rate, we definitely need our goals, and we've got to have something to shoot for and something to measure against, and that is what we're going to be looking for for the program going forward.

I've said enough, but I really appreciate your participation here.  I was scanning this stuff while everybody was talking, and I think we've got some good things to hang our hats on, but I really want to be dramatic and bold and innovative and realistic.  I know those seem to be contradictions in terms, especially that last word, but in how we approach this going forward.

So thanks for your input and your help on this.

Final Summary

Shelley Row:  And I was just sitting here thinking too, but it strikes me that one of the things we will probably do to try to sort through some of this, is to start looking at two pieces of it.  It strikes me there's content, in terms of what it is that we think we ought to be doing.  And then there's also the role, the role that we play in it.  And one thing I didn’t mention before, is I clearly heard that shift from so much heavy focus on R&D, to a focus, a balanced focus on policy and policy research.  I think that came out very clearly, so that is a role issue that we need to talk some more about.

The staff has seen me draw little boxes.  You can draw little boxes that says, this is the universe of what the JPO currently does.  You would probably say 75 to 80 percent of it is R&D related, probably, if it was 85 percent or 80 percent, then there's another 15 percent that is technology transfer, technical assistance related, and maybe a little tiny little bit that is maybe policy related.  And all of that is on the table, to think through how do we want to revision that and what is the role going forward, in terms of the role.  And do we have to figure out what is the content that it is that we need to be focusing on.  So I think we'll be looking at both of those issues and coming back to you on that as well.

We will be setting up another meeting.  We're looking at, I think, mid-March.  I don't remember if we've set a date.  It was the week of March 10th.  Does anybody know of any big issues in the week of March 10th?

Joseph Sussman:  Shelley, is the 10th a Monday?

Shelley Row:  I think it is.

Joseph Sussman:  I think the 10th and the 11th is the RTCC meeting.

Shelley Row:  So if we're looking at later in the week, does anybody know of any big issues?  Okay.  All right.  We will probably then look at -- now, while we have most of you here, what is your preference?  We're probably looking at a similar kind of arrangement, kind of a half a day and the better part of another day.  Do you have a preference on the days of the week that makes your travel life easier?

Thomas Lambert:  Not on Monday.

Shelley Row:  So like a Tuesday, Wednesday or Wednesday, Thursday.  Okay.  Well, we'll tentatively look at like the 12th and 13th, afternoon of the 12th and either the morning and afternoon of the 13th.  You might tentatively hold that, and then we will confirm as quickly as we can.  It is probable that it will not be in this building, just to try to make it a little easier on everybody.

Meeting Process Comments and Additional Resources

Let me just ask a process question before we finish up here and get everybody out a little early.  What is you reaction to the meeting and to the discussion?  Everyone's busy, have you felt that it has been a productive use of your time?  Have you felt like you've adequately able to convey your thoughts, your ideas, to be creative and express those thoughts?

Steve Albert:  I think the fruit really won't be born until after some of this is synthesized.

Joseph Sussman:  I think as a first meeting it was good to get everybody onto the same page, up to the same level of expertise, and gave us time to move forward.  I don't think we need to do this kind of thing the next several times around.

Shelley Row:  That is helpful.

Are there any things you would like for us to provide to you, that gives you further background, further information, that would help you as we continue the discussion?

Michael Replogle:  One thing I found in going through the materials, there were a lot of, sort of, compilations of individual program initiatives.  And one thing I didn't find in the materials was just a quick snapshot of what is the total scope of the program in terms of budget, in terms of staff.  That would be helpful.  Do you have a current mission statement?  What's the structure?  How do you fit within the office of the Secretary and with the other modal agencies?  Something like that, I think could be helpful for us in thinking and advising you strategically, to have that kind of snapshot.

Shelley Row:  We can certainly do that.

Greer Woodruff:  One interest in that, this may be common knowledge for everybody else here, but how does a State municipality, et cetera go about deploying technologies that are already accepted, cameras, message boards, sensors.  What's the process they have to go through and what type of funding support is available versus what they have to put up in kind?  I would kind of like to understand that backend process toward deployment.

Shelley Row:  Okay.  Is that something you would like for us to provide to you?  Because there's a couple people here that could answer that even more so than myself.

Greer Woodruff:  I'd be glad to call them later, if they'll call their hands.

Shelley Row:  Randy and Ann and Al at the local level.

Joyce Bader:  Just quickly, in terms of the process of the meeting.  I mean, in evaluating this as a plus delta, do you like the whole group discussion, do you like the small group discussion?

Ann Flemer:  I like the panel yesterday afternoon.

Joyce Bader:  The panel was good.

John Worthington:  And if we could have had some input after that, some discussion.

Ken Button:  I think this way of doing it is quite useful.

Michael Replogle:  And I think it might be, have some value to draw on what use, voices that you see, as the most thoughtful critics of what you have been up to.

Shelley Row:  That's a good idea.

Michael Replogle:  Just so we can infuse our own thinking with that critical perspective and test our own thinking against those alternative perspectives, in helping to advise the program.

John Worthington:  Ann and I were talking this morning, and it's interesting to have heard the debate among the panel, because I think there was a pretty divergent group, and there probably are more divergent groups here.  We have all kind of sublimated to a certain extent.

Joyce Bader:  We can grow as a group and get to that point.

Scott Belcher:  It would be useful, when we get back together, to revisit the material.  We plowed through a whole lot in a day, and so it would be useful not to replow everything, but just to make sure that we got it right.

Thomas Lambert:  If we have that memo from the Secretary on kind of the priorities, that would be great.  It's one thing for us to kind of dream up whatever we want, but at the end of the day, there is a political agenda.  It would be useful to understand what those priorities are.

Robert Denaro:  I would also mention the initiatives.  Are their websites the best place to find out the status?

Shelley Row:  Yes.  At our website.  If there's anything missing, we could certainly get that.

Joseph Averkamp:  Some of the panelists were referring to some analysis.  That sounded pretty in-depth, as far as recommendations.

Thomas Lambert:  We particularly want that secret memo they wouldn't talk to us about.

[Laughter.]

Randall Iwasaki:  I felt like they were going to say they were going to share it with us, but shoot us afterwards.  It made us a little nervous.

[Laughter.]

Shelley Row:  I had that note, that OSTP report.

Michael Replogle:  Another thing that could be of value, is to bring to us some succinct materials that could help us to understand how some other major countries are addressing these same issues, and how the U.S. approach compares with, for example, dominant approaches within the European Union, or thinking that comes out of the OECD or out of Japan, for example, Singapore, some of the other leaders.  And just to the extent that you do have that kind of a scan that benchmarks the U.S. against, sort of, world frameworks, sort of ITS program development priorities, emphasis, funding levels, performance.  That would be valuable, just helping us to, again, ground our knowledge base to be the best strategic advisors to you.

Steve Albert:  Since everyone is being polite, I'll throw something out.

Shelley Row:  Is it going to be polite or not polite?

[Laughter.]

Steve Albert:  I know this is probably heresy to say this, but I would love to hear from people who are under 30 or under 25 on how to use technology and what they would want in a transportation system.

Thomas Lambert:  I would be glad to share that with you next time.

[Laughter.]

Steve Albert:  I know that's a crazy idea, but I sit around the room, and with our expertise looking forward.

Shelley Row:  It might be interesting to have a small group of youngsters, to see what they think.

Randall Iwasaki:  That's one of the problems.  We have to provide a service, not only for the 25-year-olds, but for the 85-year-old that still wants to drive.  So it is diverse, you can hear what they want to say, but they're still a minority, versus the ones that are getting up in age who still want to drive.  How do you provide safe transportation for them?

Steve Albert:  I agree with you.  I would love to hear.

Joyce Bader:  I think we will making great progress with it and bring something back to you.  We can all be less polite about --

Shelley Row:  I look forward to less polite. 

Thank you all very much.  We really do appreciate your time, your attendance, your thoughtfulness, and bearing with us, amongst all of the logistical challenges.  Thank you.  You'll be hearing from us.  If you have any questions at all, any other comments you wish to share, feel free to send those to me anytime.  You have my email and I'm available to talk offline as well.  So we are available.

Thank you.

[The meeting was adjourned at 3:00 p.m.

Updated: October 9, 2008 4:13 PM