Following his remarks on the future of transportation during the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh last week, Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx sat in a conference room on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University. Around the corner from his location, ride-hailing company Uber picked up passengers in an autonomous vehicle. Down the road, dozens of traffic lights that incorporate artificial intelligence and real-time sensor data provided smoother traffic flow for motorists and trimmed their travel times by nearly a third.
In Pittsburgh and elsewhere, the transportation future that Foxx had just finished describing is playing out very much in real time. Technology advances, in some cases, have made developments including autonomous driving possible. But in other areas, that transportation future is occurring now because of unconventional policies promoted by Foxx and the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Car and Driver caught up with Foxx in Pittsburgh. The DOT chief, previously mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, reflected on the promise of autonomous and connected cars, the recent Smart City Challenge, the massive increase in traffic deaths, the potential of the shared vehicles unfolding right outside the window, and more. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for grammar and brevity.
Car and Driver: You announced two new grant programs this morning that focus on advanced transportation and mobility technology. Are these an outgrowth of the Smart City Challenge?
AF: These grants are about harnessing technology to solve mobility problems, basically. In Pittsburgh, for example, the grants will help support improved traffic signalization. They’ll do some connected-vehicle stuff with some of the transit vehicles. They have this idea of creating a connected spine, a certain corridor, within Pittsburgh that would demonstrate all this next-stage technology. Coincidentally, that was part of their Smart City application. We said from the beginning with Smart City that there were no losers. We saw cities that were developing visions, and we were trying to find ways to help them as they implement those visions. So this is a case in point.
You received many applications for the Smart City Challenge—something like 78 in all. Where did that interest spring from?
You know, we’ve had a dark winter in transportation, where the funding hasn’t been in place and big problems have been put on the shelf, and the imagination had sort of started to die a little bit. It’s good to see us in this renaissance period, starting to imagine a better transportation future. We were on the cusp of passing on to the next generation longer travel times, which no generation of Americans has done. I think we’re starting to imagine that actually we can get travel times down faster. Maybe we can use technology to solve for congestion and climate change, and to make us smarter as we make decisions on where to place a road network or what have you. So I’m very optimistic that we have shifted the conversation to a more proactive and positive direction.
The Smart City Challenge really seemed to open the door to a lot of private and public collaboration. San Francisco had obtained $150 million in private-sector support associated with its application, Columbus had $90 million. Some of the other cities had similar pledged private support. Is that sort of public/private collaboration the future?
The thing is, some of this stuff was starting to bubble, but it hadn’t boiled over yet. And the reason was there was no catalyst. That’s what I was talking about. When you have consistent federal funding and you can have programs that are aspirational, you can do stuff like that. But we had gone through this period of time where we just weren’t doing it. The Smart City Challenge started to capitalize on it and have that conversation in places like San Francisco, Austin, Denver, Kansas City, and Pittsburgh. They said, ‘You know what? We can develop a vision and have some partners in our back yard who want to help us, and as a matter of fact, $40 million can help us.’ So it started to build on itself.
Regarding another aspect of public/private space, there are a lot of ride-hailing and ride-sharing companies partnering with local transit agencies in one way or another. Do you foresee a day when those private sharing companies eclipse public transportation? Are they complementary or competitive, and how does public transportation evolve?
I think it’s too early to say. The goal of public transportation is to help someone who doesn’t own a car get from one place to another. Right now, with the ride-sharing services, even people who own cars are opting into using those services, perhaps intermittently, to negate parking or whatever. The Mobility On Demand grants that we announced [at the conference] are going to help experiment with complementary services between transit agencies and ride-sharing companies, and we’re seeing partnerships emerge in places like Dallas. But whether ultimately ride sharing takes over is hard to question. I don’t know, quite frankly, and that’s one of the exciting things about this whole area. What has been a static product—public transportation—is now becoming much more dynamic.
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I don’t know whether we created an inflection point
in transportation or whether the inflection point happened. But we had to do something different.
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[Zipcar founder] Robin Chase said that she envisioned a future in which she’s riding her bike three miles every day without being worried about being hit by a truck. Clearly, from the latest statistics, road users like bicyclists are as vulnerable as ever. What’s the bridge to that future, where bicyclists and pedestrians can use the roads safely and not have those fears, especially as traffic fatalities are going up?
It’s a big concern of mine. When I came [into this position] as a former mayor, I had my team show me the accident and fatality statistics across modes, and at the time, bike and pedestrians were the only ones going up. So we built an initiative around it. Here’s the brutal reality of it: Most of the bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure in the country is put in place by local government, so our initiative focused on best-practice sharing among mayors. This is completely consistent with what I’ve said before about the age of cities in the 21st century, and the fact that, while states may be the laboratories of democracy, cities are going to be the laboratories of transportation. Having said that, we have to think about, number one, how are we building our street networks and providing for maximum safety for all users, including pedestrians and bicyclists?
I should note our sidewalks are inequitably distributed in this country. Fewer than half of the low-income communities in this country have sidewalks, so we need to be paying attention to that at the local level, and we have to think about how technology relates to this as well. It’s not just vehicle-to-vehicle communication. It’s vehicle to pedestrian and vehicle to bicycle. It’s how these connected and autonomous technologies can be taught to help us avoid accidents that occur today.
Now traffic fatalities of all kinds are on the rise, and just within the past few weeks, you’ve unveiled the Road to Zero initiative. Obviously vehicle miles traveled are up, but what role does cellphone use play in the rising numbers? Can we just say it’s obviously cellphones?
We’re still worried about distraction [and] the impaired driving, the folks not wearing seatbelts. There’s a lot of reasons why. We’ve actually put out a call through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for more study and research into precisely what the cause is. It’s easy to say gas prices are low and people are driving more, and therefore we’re seeing this uptick. But that’s neither a sufficient explanation nor an excuse for the numbers going up. So we have to figure it out. That’s one of the exciting things about the technology wave that’s happening in transportation. It’s like what was happening in the mobile-phone industry 20 years ago. In this industry, the possibility that data and analytics can tell us precisely why things like this are happening and give us a basis for changing policy is pretty exciting. But we need to know more.
You mentioned V2V earlier. There’s some perception out there that it’s not as important as autonomous technology. Has vehicle-to-vehicle development taken a back seat? Is that accurate?
My goal is not to put our thumb on the scale. We think there are advantages to connected vehicles. We also understand there’s a view that autonomous vehicles can be as safe as a connected car. What we have to be, as an agency, is open to all the possibilities, and while we’re being open to the possibilities, to do the best job we can. Preparing for a connected-vehicle future has been the charge of the agency for quite some time. So we’ll continue doing that, and—cross my fingers and cross my heart—we’ll get the connected-vehicle rule as an NPRM [Notice of Proposed Rulemaking] before the end of the administration and let that process run its course.
V2V, cybersecurity—you have a lot to do before the end of the administration.
I’m not bored. Not bored at all.
In terms of the safety improvements autonomous cars might offer, NHTSA administrator Mark Rosekind has said that autonomous vehicles need to be twice as good. Do you agree with that, and what’s the timetable for autonomous cars going from twice as good as human drivers to really helping get toward that zero number?
We wouldn’t be in this conversation if we didn’t think there were safety advantages. We do believe the autonomous vehicle can be safer than the human-operated car. But we also have to remember this is a nascent area, and that in order to capture those advantages, we have to set the right level between safety culture and innovation. And frankly, we don’t think those two things are inconsistent with each other. That’s why our guidelines set out to be more directional than prescriptive, and I think as the area matures and we know more about what works and what doesn’t work, we’ll begin answering some of the questions people want to see more clarity around.
The good thing about the guidelines is, they’ve focused the conversation. We’re no longer talking in platitudes. We’re now saying, ‘What does data sharing mean, and how can that actually occur? What information is proprietary and confidential business information that my company doesn’t want to share? What information actually might be useful for my company to have shared anonymously among folks in the industry, and how can the industry come together on cyber security?’ That will be a huge issue in this area—and privacy as well. So I think we’ve laid the table properly and the conversation will evolve. Mostly, I think, our job right now is to context set, so that the safety culture is infused at the beginning and to give people a sense of where our heads are. Hopefully, that will fill the vacuum enough to continue seeing innovation occur.
The guidelines address vehicles, but how do they address vulnerable road users? The Trolley Question seems particularly relevant, since one automaker went on record saying that its self-driving systems will prioritize vehicle occupants over pedestrians.
One of the things we’ve flagged in the guidelines is ethical challenges. One of the things I will do before I leave the department is to set up an ongoing advisory council to the secretary that will keep questions like that in front of us. We don’t know the answers right now. A particular manufacturer may have a particular view, but we’re going to have a view, I suspect, over time. That has to be thought about very carefully, and I want to create an advisory council that brings together competencies in a wide range of areas. We hear a lot about labor-market disruption, and I want a voice that helps us think through ethics—not as a decider, but as a vehicle to help us place those discussions in their proper context. I think, over time, we’ll answer them. But as I said, there are questions we can answer today, right now, and some that will have to gestate for a while.
During your time with the DOT, you’ve addressed everything from urban planning, with the Every Place Counts design challenge, to artificial intelligence here in Pittsburgh. Has the scope of this job changed dramatically? What advice do you have for your successor going forward?
Fundamental questions about transportation needed to be asked. How is transportation helping us deal with the increased social and economic divide in this country? What are we going to do about massive population shifts into highly constrained urban areas? How can technology be harnessed to help us build a better future? We’ve asked fundamental questions, and we’ve begun answering many of them. Hopefully, we’re on this unalterable course toward a future that will help us achieve some of this. I don’t know whether we created an inflection point in transportation or whether the inflection point happened. But we had to do something different.
Getting a surface transportation bill was good, and it provided a floor of funding, so there’s more certainty. What it really did was give cities like Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Denver, Austin, and Columbus a chance to breathe and say, ‘There’s a floor, and now we have to imagine where the ceiling is.’ That’s where the real transformative stuff is, and I like to think that we’ve taken this [functional] subject and made it relevant to the big questions the country is facing.
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