Road Commission, LTU launch new road safety tech

OAKLAND COUNTY — On July 16, the city of Southfield sponsored a public demonstration of the latest road safety technology being piloted in Southfield and Oakland County, conducted by P3Mobility and the Road Commission for Oakland County at Lawrence Technological University.

The public open house showcased a simulation of the technology, which will be installed at five intersections throughout Oakland County and in 10 vehicles to be studied for a year. The intersections include:

• Church Street and 10 Mile Road in Oak Park.

• 12 Mile Road at Northwood Elementary School in Royal Oak.

• Greenfield at 10 Mile in Southfield.

• 12 Mile and Main St. in Royal Oak.

• Greenfield and Lincoln in Southfield.

“This is what we call connected vehicle technology,” Craig Bryson, the senior communications manager for the Road Commission, said. “So, the long-term goal is that cars will be equipped with this, the infrastructure will be equipped with this so that all of this stuff is talking to each other. The cars and the infrastructure are all talking to each other. There are sensors that detect pedestrians so that when you’re driving down the street, if there’s a car about to pull out in front of you, for example, but it’s not within your line of sight — say, it’s behind a building, but it’s accelerating to pull out right in front of you — that car will tell your car that that’s about to happen. Ultimately, someday, your car will automatically break. In the near term, that’ll probably just give you a warning that, ‘Hey, there’s a car. Warning, there’s a car about to pull out in front view.’”

The connected vehicle technology will alert drivers to potential hazards such as vehicles, bicyclists, pedestrians, deer, etc., regardless of whether they are in view.

This technology is part of a project called “Leading in Sustainable Safety with Technology,” funded through a $2 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to build a model for deploying safety-critical communication technology nationwide. The grant was a Stage 1 Planning and Prototyping Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation grant.

The city of Southfield paid around $1,600 to bring the equipment to LTU for the demonstration.

“This technology makes so much sense,” Southfield City Administrator Fred Zorn said. “We make cars here. We got all this engineering talent. We’re doing so much in Southfield, particularly our businesses that are involved in the driverless technology, and that this is all of this stuff coming together. Lawrence Tech has faculty members on the committee. I think there are two LTU persons, myself, Erin from P3Mobility, and Craig Bryson from the Road Commission.”

Bryson explained that the grant proposal included a test implementation of the technology with the goal of proving that the technology works and looking into a funding model that could be used to expand nationwide to help speed up the implementation of this technology.

Bryson added that for the last 30 years, Oakland County has either had the lowest fatality rate in Michigan or tied for the lowest. He explained that this is because the Road Commission was one of the first road agencies in the country to start using crash data to identify projects and project design.

“We look at where the crashes are. We look at what’s causing them,” he said. “Is it something in the design of the road that can be corrected? For example, every year, we totally reconstruct a mile or two of road. We look at where the crashes are and the high crash locations. If we identify a road segment that has high crashes, and we can determine that those crashes are at least in part based on something in the design of the road, that project will rise to the top of our list so that we can correct that when we redesign the project for the reconstruction.”

Bryson shared that according to 2023 data, Oakland County had a traffic fatality rate of 0.46, which is the number of fatalities per 100 million miles of vehicle travel. The national rate was 1.35, and Michigan’s rate was 1.15.

Erin Milligan is the founder and CEO of P3Mobility, a seven-year-old technology startup with the mission to “improve safety, mobility, and sustainability through Connected Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technology.”

Milligan said that the average annual cost of crashes near intersections in Oakland County is $445,299,720. She said that they believe this technology will save residents money and also save lives.

“The problem is safety,” she said. “There’s 40,000 people who lose their lives in traffic crashes every year, and hundreds of thousands whose lives are changed forever by injuries that they experience. On this chart over here, we talk about the cost of crashes in Oakland County alone. Each year in Oakland County, the cost of crashes is almost half a billion dollars, and that’s just to cover the economic costs like the property damage or medical bills. It doesn’t take into account any of the emotional suffering that comes as a whole result of a car crash,” she said. “We can save lives. It’s really important that people experience it, understand what it could do, and be open to it, because it’s always hard to embrace change, but it’s important.”

According to Bryson, if funding is secured, the next phase of the project would include the expansion into other areas of Oakland County.

Bryson explained that the connected vehicle technology aligns with what the Road Commission is all about.

“We have long been on the cutting edge of traffic technology here in Oakland County,” he said. “We were the first road agency in the nation to use a smart traffic signal system, where the signal detects the traffic at the intersection, and computer algorithms determine the best traffic signal timing to most efficiently move that traffic. We’re still one of the largest systems of that kind in the nation and really in the world. We remain on the cutting edge in that we have been a test bed for all kinds of connected vehicles and smart vehicle smart infrastructure technology.”

For more information on P3Mobility, visit p3mobility.com.

To learn more about the Road Commission for Oakland County, visit www.rcocweb.org.