Safer Travel With Autonomous Vehicles Tested On I-395 Express Lanes

ARLINGTON, VA — Crash avoidance demonstrations using autonomous vehicles were conducted on the Interstate 395 Express Lanes in Arlington last week to see how the vehicles would respond to the presence of first responders and traffic incidents on the highway.

The partnership of the Virginia Department of Transportation, the Virginia Tech Transportation Initiative (VTTI), Transurban North America and Crash Avoidance Metrics Partners LLC sought to identify situations in which connected autonomous vehicles, or CAVs, would need to respond quickly and appropriately.

The demonstrations were funded in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to support research into CAVs, also known as automated driving systems, or ADS.

“What we are proving here is the capability of smart infrastructure to communicate with smart vehicles and first responders — making travel safer and faster,” Japjeev Kohli, vice president of technology for Transurban North America, said in a statement.

“Smart roads, like Transurban’s Express Lanes, are leading the way in integrated infrastructure technology — and we are just getting started,” Kohli said. “These demonstrations are only the beginning of making every road a smart road as future cars become smarter cars.”

More demonstrations are scheduled to be conducted on the I-395 Express Lanes in November. The express lanes were built by toll road operator Transurban in partnership with VDOT.

The demonstrations, conducted from Oct. 11 to Oct. 13, were part of a project called Safely Operating ADS (Autonomous Driving Systems) in Challenging Dynamic Scenarios. The demonstrations featured the Virginia Tech Transportation Initiative’s Level 4 autonomous Ford F-150 moving through numerous public safety interactions on the express lanes.

Level 4 means that within a certain type of roadway and in certain weather conditions, a vehicle should be able to operate itself without the expectation of a driver taking over.

“Right now, from a driver capability perspective, you can think of it as sort of like a toddler,” said Mike Mollenhauer, division director of technology implementation at VTTI. “It can do a lot of things, but it can also get itself into trouble because it doesn’t have a lot of experience yet.”

The demonstrations put a CAV through a series of scenarios meant to challenge the vehicle and ensure its performance keeps everyone — both inside and outside the vehicle — safe. The scenarios included:

• A law enforcement officer providing hand signal around a simulated crash scene.
• Detecting upcoming hazards out of the line of sight of the CAV through communication with the roadway technology.
• Navigating safely around first responders and construction workers and work zones.
• Forming a tight vehicle formation based on real-time speed and distance information as road density increases.

The project partners received a $7.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration in 2019. Since then, the VTTI research team has worked with VDOT and Transurban to develop the project parameters and to outfit a 2022 hybrid truck with technology that can require as much as 120 amps to operate.

Mollenhauer said that while the project has made great progress, it also has revealed many unanswered questions related to public safety and autonomous vehicles. Those are areas VTTI plans to continue to work with public and private partners to address through its research, he said.

“That means expanding on some of the capabilities we’ve developed and perhaps building on some of them by really getting out there and having the people that do this work – fire, EMS [emergency medical services], law enforcement – interacting with and trying out these vehicles to give us feedback,” Mollenhauer said.