Charging ahead

Craig Cantrell reveals how consolidation of system components and greater interoperability within the intelligent transportation market could help generate the much needed funding required to maintain and expand America’s transportation infrastructure.

What is Federal Signal's role as it relates to the transportation market space?
Craig Cantrell. Federal Signal offers best in breed technologies and solutions to customers in the road user charging and traffic data collection markets. With the acquisition of PIPS Technology, Federal Signal simultaneously established a leadership position in, and demonstrated a commitment to, this market space. As a leading global provider of automated license plate recognition technology, PIPS is an example of the market leading brands found throughout Federal Signal's diverse product portfolio. 

Why do you believe road user charging is such a hot topic currently?
CC. The demands placed on public road infrastructure in terms of miles driven are significantly outpacing the growth rate of new roads. At the same time, spending on our existing road infrastructure for maintenance and expansion has actually declined by almost 50 percent over the last five decades. The gas tax has seen a decrease in purchasing power of almost 33 percent in the last 15 years due to the fact that it is not being adjusted for inflation. We are headed down a path with our road network that none of us want to travel.

Transportation professionals must make smart decisions to make better use of the roadways we have and also generate revenue to offset the financial shortfall that is needed to maintain and expand our nation's transportation infrastructure. This realization brought about Congress' creation of the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission.

Earlier this year the Commission estimated that the revenue raised by all levels of government for capital investment will total about one-third of the roughly $200 billion necessary each year to maintain and improve the nation's highways and transit systems. The Commission also estimated that the cost of traffic congestion in the top urban areas in the US amounted to nearly $80 billion. Figures like these command attention.

Isn't road user charging simply an additional tax?
CC. Do you view your electric or water bills as taxes? It's the same concept - you pay for what you use.  Taxes are a levy on the taxpayer not necessarily correlated to how those taxes are spent and not necessarily benefiting the taxpayers. On the contrary, road user charging is a fund raising mechanism targeting the specific users of the transportation system - with the funds raised benefiting the users of the system.

Ultimately the issue is implementing the best systems to address infrastructure funding issues that - if left alone - have dire consequences to the general public. Existing roadways continue to deteriorate and new road construction halts, while more and more cars hit the road. This alternative has unacceptable direct and indirect implications for our society.

What advancements do you see for road user charging in the near future?
CC. Our focus at PIPS will continue to be the advancement of our technology for better performance and user adoption and to enable more cost effective solutions for tolling and traffic data collection. Looking at the state of the industry today, we believe there are real opportunities to increase the impact of these solutions. Today, many different providers offer components of a solution with little to no interoperability across systems deployed. The burden falls on the integrator to pull it all together and these solutions operate in isolation of each other. Moving forward, consolidation of system components and greater interoperability of the solutions deployed will drive cost reduction while improving the overall experience for all stakeholders, including the traveler. For example, at E-470 in Denver, PIPS worked with tollway management and other vendors to deliver an improved process for vehicle tolling that introduced a totally cashless system utilizing the license plate as the vehicle identifier. The benefits of this approach include reduced operating costs and increased traveler satisfaction when using the tollway. We believe this is just a small example of what lies ahead in solution improvements for this segment of the intelligent transportation market space.

Craig Cantrell has approximately 20 years of high tech business management experience working for companies involved in the development of data acquisition systems and software toolsets for data analysis.  He currently serves as the Vice President and General Manager of the PIPS Technology, Inc operation, a division of Federal Signal Corporation, headquartered in Knoxville, TN and has served in this capacity since joining PIPS Technology in June, 2003.