Vanderbilt University and the Tennessee Department of Transportation are working together to study traffic on Interstate 24 in hopes of smoothing out traffic and making driving safer.
The transportation department is putting up cameras on poles upwards of 110 feet to record the traffic that occurs. Researchers will use the data gathered to test how autonomous vehicles could influence traffic formed and research traffic.
“So, you have, I think, a wonderful understanding… really how people operate that can’t be done anywhere else in the world to our knowledge,” said Meredith Cebalek, the Tennessee transportation systems management and operations department leader at consulting firm Gresham-Smith and “engineer of record” for the project.
Traffic data will be created when the roads are busy and crowded, explained Professor Dan Work from Vanderbilt, who is one of the leaders of the project. So-called “phantom traffic” is formed through, not crashes or lights, but rather through human reactions to traffic conditions. One driver who briefly hits their breaks, for example, can cause a chain reaction of the drivers behind them hitting their breaks for miles.
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“A lot of the infrastructure that’s going out there is really going to help us make travel times more predictable,” said Work.
Normally, data about traffic safety can only be generated with crashes — a small data set, explained Brad Freeze, director of traffic operations at the Tennessee Department of Transportation. Near misses, which can be seen with this data, generate more data for use and study.
“So, it’s a wonderful tool to allow the department and others to get a small-scale example of how something might work before really investing anything that could be a significant fiscal investment,” said Cebalek.
The video, in its raw form, will not be stored but rather be digitized, explained Freeze. The digitized videos will be able to show where disruptions occur in the traffic flow.
In past experiments with closed courses, autonomous vehicles were able to decrease traffic. Work is interested in seeing how autonomous vehicles affect real traffic, so the study includes plans for as many as 100 manned autonomous vehicles driving at once on Interstate 24.
Information from the project will be used to increase safety on the road as well as decrease variations in travel time. Freeze explained that the project should decrease the situations where the same trip by distance could take an hour or thirty minutes.
“Nothing bothers me more,” he said.
The data that the project generates will also be used for autonomous vehicles in the future.
Work said that this project is only possible because of the work and infrastructure put in by the Tennessee Department of Transportation, which is why I-24 will host the project. The project’s construction should be completed next year.
“I joke that I’m probably the only person who moved to Nashville because of the traffic,” joked Work.