Traffic fatalities surged to 42,915 in 2021 in the U.S. following a earlier steep rise in 2020, eliciting more calls for faster action on new safety technologies including vehicle sensors and wireless connections to traffic command centers and other vehicles and roadside infrastructure.
“This crisis on our roads is urgent and preventable,” said National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Deputy Administrator Steven Cliff in a statement.
NHTSA said the 2021 projected total was a 10.5% increase from the 38,824 fatalities in 2020 and the highest number of fatalities since 2005.
A group of technology company executives spoke Tuesday on a panel focused on cellular-vehicle to everything (C-V2X) safety applications, saying drivers would benefit with more real-time safety notifications sent directly to vehicles from other cars, roadside units or traffic centers.
Meanwhile, carmakers around the globe are developing new technologies to appear in next-generation vehicles that use cameras, radars and lidars to make nearly instant autonomous reactions to dangers such as oncoming vehicles or children running into a roadway. Some newer model cars already rely on a series of sensors to help vehicles automatically avoid rear-end collisions and lane drift situations where drivers have not paid close attention.
“Our mission is really to create safer and more efficient transportation,” said Laszlo Virag, CEO of Commsignia, which makes onboard units to provide alert drivers about speed advisories and more.
Bryan Mulligan, president and founder of Applied Information, said the NHTSA 2021 fatality projection reinforced the need for traffic authorities in cities and counties to seek experimental licenses from the FCC to test and develop C-V2X applications.
“The infrastructure and maturity of technology is not a barrier to adoption,” he said.
Applied Information, working with Qualcomm and Audi, offered a real-world tech demonstration in Atlanta last week showing how radios installed in a school bus and in a passing Audi could communicate directly for safety. As an Audi vehicle passed a stopped school bus with its stop sign raised, the Audi received a dashboard warning to stop.
Fulton County, which surrounds Atlanta, received up to 680 violations in a single day where cars had overtaken buses with stop signs deployed, Mulligan noted.
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Noting the nearly 43,000 traffic deaths in 2021, Audi’s Brad Stertz, director of government affairs in Washington, added, “Technology is a way to improve that number….C-V2X is ready to deploy with very quick wins for safety.”
Jim Misener, global V2X ecosystem lead, urged the FCC to act on a waiver request submitted last December. “We’re hopeful the FCC will take action on waivers,” he said. “We rue the fact we’ve lost spectrum.”
Misener explained that if the FCC grants a waiver that automakers, state departments of transportation and equipment manufacturers have requested, deployments of C-V2X can start “right away.” However, the FCC still has not posted the December waiver request for any public comment, he noted.
The waiver he referred is a waiver from the FCC’s current 5.9 GHz rules. A waiver request to the FCC filed on Dec. 13, 2021, included nine equipment makers, the departments of transportation from Utah and Virginia and automakers Ford, Jaguar Land Rover and Audi of America. Qualcomm was not among the nine equipment makers but supplies chips and components to at least some of them.
The parties said there was a need to “immediately deliver C-V2X safety services to American travelers, especially as deployments accelerate in other regions of the world.” It called C-V2X “state of the art roadway safety.”
The FCC voted unanimously in 2020 to free up the lower 45 MHz of the 5.9 GHz band for wireless 5G broadband while retaining the remaining upper 30 MHZ for V2V communications. Then in October 2021, the FCC said there was “a pressing need for improved Wi-Fi internet service and other unlicensed uses” adding that the 5.9 GHz spectrum could be freed up “while also preserving ample capacity for present and anticipated vehicular-communication needs.”
The FCC said that Wi-Fi “barely existed” when V2V won the spectrum more than 20 years ago but has now “exploded” with the rise in remote work with the pandemic.
The C-V2X panelists noted that President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law invests up to $6 billion over five years to fund local efforts to reduce roadway crashes and fatalities. “The infrastructure law opened the door for unprecedented funding that’s discretionary and up for competition,” Qualcomm’s Misener noted.