Fairlawn, Ohio, tucked between Akron and Cleveland with a population of about 7,800, is upgrading signals along its busy Market Street, which also serves as State Route 18, with vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology. That will let first responders pre-empt traffic signals and communicate those alerts to travelers with connected vehicle technology, with the TravelSafely App, a consumer-facing app, providing the same level of information to users in older cars, on a bicycle or walking.
“Fairlawn was a good candidate for connected vehicle technology testing because its local leadership showed a vested interest and had already performed the groundwork to identify the specific transportation challenge they hope to solve,” said Breanna Badanes, managing director of communications and policy at DriveOhio, an arm of the Ohio Department of Transportation focusing on smart mobility technology.
Deployment of the technology began in August and is expected to be complete this month. Applied Information is the technology partner along with Path Master, a maker of traffic control systems. The Market Street corridor serves some 30,000 vehicles a day.
In addition to providing GPS-enabled emergency vehicle signal pre-emption, the connected vehicle system will offer signal priority to transit vehicles and snowplows — creating a virtual bus rapid transit (BRT) lane for the former, Ernie Staten, service director for the Fairlawn Public Service Department, said.
“This project will now give them [buses] a virtual BRT, where if they’re going down the corridor, it will hold the lights green a little longer, if they’re moving. And if they stop to pick up people, it will allow the signal to activate, just as it normally would, but then get green as soon as they start moving,” Staten said, noting Fairlawn will be the first city in Ohio to use the priority signal technology for snowplows, and the virtual BRT concept.
The system is expected to increase safety by sharing information related to the movement of buses, snowplows and emergency vehicles with other road users, offering better situational awareness to the more vulnerable, like pedestrians or cyclists.
“If the pedestrians have the app, and the cars have the app, you will know when a pedestrian is in the road,” Staten said. “This will be another alert to, obviously, avoid those types of accidents.”
The state is providing “strategic guidance” around the design and deployment of the project, Badanes said.
“DriveOhio leads an effort nationally to develop a consistent approach to [connected vehicle] CV messaging because mobile apps and systems must be able to interoperate and share data for any connected vehicle solution to be scalable,” she said via email.
Efforts like this one open the door to introducing more technology into transportation corridors, with the goal of increasing the efficiency of the system, but also its safety, supporters said.
“This deployment marks a significant advancement in Ohio’s intelligent transportation infrastructure,” Bryan Mulligan, president of Applied Information, said in a statement. “Fairlawn is demonstrating how connected vehicle technology can benefit a wide range of community members — from students walking to school to firefighters on emergency calls.”
