TIGER grant set to improve bus service in and around our nation's capital - USDOT Blog

I am at another IntelliDrive Workshop and helping define research topics that will define how vehicles communicate to the infrastructure and the applications that will be developed. There are several discussion items swirling around the future of the vehicle fleet and how transportation engineers will handle the new data. Our interest as a government agency is improving safety of travellers using information from vehicles.

One of the challenges of research is to get adoption of the new concept. There are so many good ideas that have been studied, but remain unimplemented because of technology transfer.

I believe that projects should have elements of research in them and this blog posting by USDOT made me think about how IntelliDrive could be rolled out. If the federal government tied funding to specific technology enhancements like this one (TIGER grant set to improve bus service in and around our nation's capital - Welcome to the FastLane: The Official Blog of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation) and built in research as a part of the grant, the agency might serve itself well by implementing best practice and eliminating the need for Tech Transfer to their specific agency. There would be a research component tied to the project and the funding for research would be less difficult to find. A downside is it could increase the time needed before implementation because research isn't always on a fast track.