“We are now in a good place as our RSUs are operating reliably in the field. We’ll probably start getting requests from our in-house safety studies teams and try to use some of the data to analyze traffic saturation and what happened with the pedestrians.” – Kyle Higgins told us. 

The thing to know about ITS in Florida is that they use the SunGuide Traffic Management Center solution to establish connection with V2X equipment and to operate a vast digital roadside infrastructure. There are various applications attached to SunGuide that help sending out V2X messages. These include general roadway alerts, wrong way driver alerts and construction area information for V2X enabled fleets operating in Florida. SunGuide also helps capture all the data coming back from connected vehicles.

“There is another platform that’s hosted by the FDOT central office called the DEP, Data Exchange Platform, and we’re forwarding every single message that we’re getting off of our RSUs. We also have a pilot project at University of Central Florida (UCF) in which they will receive decoded V2X data to do scientific studies on them.”

“I am very excited about the future. It would be great if our timing engineers, for example, could see when vehicles in a lane of a three-lane road are traveling 20% faster at a certain time on a regular basis for some reason. Of course, we have that kind of data if there’s loop detection, and radar detection, and it’s set up properly, and if you can get the data out of it at all.” – said Kyle Higgins.

When you consider that connected vehicles send raw data about themselves ten times every second using BSM messages alone, and how little information we get from loop detectors, MVDs or point-shoot radars in comparison, you can see that the advantage of V2X is huge.

Connected vehicles provide granular data and get straight to the point. I see the potential, but penetration has to be there – said Kyle Higgins. “Once that’s there, that’ll be golden.”