TRAN Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORT

LE COMITÉ PERMANENT DES TRANSPORTS

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Wednesday, December 2, 1998

• 1539

[English]

The Chairman (Mr. Raymond Bonin (Nickel Belt, Lib.)): I call the meeting to order. Thank you very much, colleagues and special guests, for being here.

I apologize for being a few minutes late. My colleagues know that's not a habit with me, but I'm late because I tabled your Bill C-58. It's been completed and you did a fine job. I want to commend you all.

• 1540

They don't usually pay attention to me when I speak, but it's in writing, so they'll end up having to read it, whether they like it or not.

Mr. Lou Sekora (Port Moody—Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, Lib.): It makes it a lot easier.

The Chairman: We have with us, from Lockheed Martin, Mr. Bob Morrin, vice-president of business development; Ms. Sandra Sultana, system engineer; and Mr. Patrick McGowan, operations manager, intelligent transportation systems.

I want to thank you, because we realize we didn't give you much notice. If it had been impossible for you to come before Christmas we would have understood, but you are here and we appreciate it. This will assist us in preparing a study we want to do starting in February, so you're contributing greatly to the planning of our work.

Without further ado, if you have a verbal presentation or whatever, the time is yours.

Mr. Bob Morrin (Vice-President, Business Development, Lockheed Martin): Thank you very much. We appreciate the opportunity to be able to provide you information on intelligent transportation systems, or as they're sometimes referred to, ITS.

I'm fortunate today to have two world-class practitioners in ITS. Mr. Patrick McGowan, who works out of our office in Denver, has spent 12 years with the Texas Department of Transportation. He was the designer and implementer of a system called TransGuide, which is in the San Antonio area. We have two videos we'll be showing you today. One is on the TransGuide system and the other is on the Orion system in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Pat was also involved in a number of other ITS initiatives in the state of Texas. He is the manager of operations for Lockheed Martin Canada's ITS operation, and all our projects in this area report to Pat.

Also with me today is Sandra Sultana, who works out of our Montreal office. She has spent 15 years with the Quebec Ministry of Transportation. We were fortunate to ply her away from the civil service and have her join us quite recently. She has developed, deployed, and been involved with the operation of the Montreal freeway traffic management system. She's also active in many industry bodies, including being on the board of directors of ITS Canada.

Lockheed Martin Canada is part of the Lockheed Martin Corporation. Lockheed Martin is a $28 billion a year company. We're organized into five different sectors. The aeronautics sector is the traditional aircraft building group. They build the C-130 aircraft and the F-16 aircraft and other items such as that.

The electronics group, which Lockheed Martin Canada is actually part of, develops electronic platforms. So we're involved in some of the helicopter programs in the United States and the U.K.

We also have an information systems and services group that delivers information technology. In fact, Lockheed Martin is one of the largest deliverers of IT projects to the American government.

We have a small energy and environment group and then the space and strategic missiles group.

Just to position Lockheed Martin Canada a little bit, our head office is currently located in Kanata, which is where I work. The heritage of Lockheed Martin Canada goes back about 40 years, and as a result of a number of mergers and acquisitions in the defence industry, you'll see the heritage companies that have made us up.

There are 650 people employed within Lockheed Martin Canada in locations across Canada. Our main facilities are in Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax.

In May 1998 Lockheed Martin Canada did what I'd call an internal acquisition. We basically received the worldwide mandate or charter within Lockheed Martin for doing all intelligent transportation systems worldwide. In doing that, we migrated a lot of the capability into our office in Montreal, but we also have our office in Denver that reports to us. And then we're doing projects all across the United States.

• 1545

Without further ado, I'll turn to Patrick McGowan, who will be able to provide you with details on ITS. Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you very much.

Before you begin, I just want to assure you that if you want to feel more comfortable, if you want to take off your jacket, we're very relaxed here, especially in December when it's that mild outside. These buildings are very warm, so feel comfortable, everyone.

Mr. Patrick McGowan (Operations Manager, Intelligent Transportation Systems, Lockheed Martin): Thank you. I heard this was the norm, so I'm expecting big things next year.

I'm the manager of operations for Lockheed Martin, and all ITS programs within the corporation report to me. I just wanted to go over a few things. Bob asked me to come up and talk to you about four things.

First, we're going to show you a video of a system in the United States, in San Antonio. It's called TransGuide, and it's one of the leading systems in the country right now. It just recently completed a program called the model deployment initiative. This was one of three showcases around the nation to basically show what ITS and the benefits of ITS can actually do within a metropolitan area.

Second, we want to talk about ITS in general: what it is, what are the components of ITS, what is the complexity of these systems.

Third, we want to talk about Lockheed Martin's role in ITS.

Finally, I want to talk about the benefits of ITS, how it actually helps the community, what are the benefits. I mean, it's more than just technology. It's there to solve a problem, and it's doing a very good job of it.

And then we have a final video out of Minnesota, where we have a lot of the partners. They actually wanted to get together and put together a benefits program, and they are talking about how it has helped their community.

First, I'd like to show a video about an advanced traffic management system. TransGuide was set up to be able to detect whether an accident or congestion occurred anywhere within the freeway within two minutes, and then be able to respond to that incident within 15 seconds. That may change a hundred verbal-message signs, change the traffic signals, change the lane control signals over the roadway. It does a lot. The whole point of that is to quickly respond to the incident before traffic backs up several miles, where at that point it's almost too late to do anything.

Finally, there was a traveller information system. We'll also show something on this, and we'll talk a little about it. That was about how we get this information gathered and collected out of the ATMS system and then send it out to the travellers so that they can make educated decisions on modes of transportation and other things.

• 1550

[Editor's Note: Video presentation]

• 1559

Mr. Patrick McGowan: The reason we showed you the video is to give you an idea, before we go into a presentation, of what an ITS system is and some of the benefits and some of the technologies involved.

• 1600

TransGuide we started with in late 1990 as a blank piece of paper, and throughout those years we've been able to build the system up to solve particular problems within the metropolitan area and to come up with what is referred to as TransGuide. TransGuide is not a company. It's a name we came up with out of the air. Myself and two other people fought for a couple of months on what we were going to call this, but it was to come up with a name for the technology that people could probably relate to. The people behind it are the Texas Department of Transportation, the City of San Antonio, the police department, the fire department and EMS. Instead of the Texas DOT sitting there waving a flag saying come in and join this and put a big Texas-style logo on it, we came up with a generic name so that everybody could act as a partner in this.

There were three things that really surprised us. In going through the design, we always knew it could work well. On this what really surprised us is how well it actually worked. Every day we used to see backups for two miles on the freeways, day-to-day congestion. Once we turned the system on and we were able to notify people where the congestion was and to look for alternative routes, those two-mile backups shortened up to a half a mile or a quarter of a mile. We didn't solve every piece of congestion out there, but we were greatly able to reduce it. In the accidents on the freeway is probably where we saw the most significant benefit.

What people would do is before the TransGuide system went online they would rush up to the freeway and try to see what lane the police officer was trying to get everybody into. So everybody would come up to the accident, stop, and then they would sneak by in whichever lane they had to be in and they would all take a look. The thing is that when we notify people well in advance of an accident, one mile, two miles up the freeway, with lane control signals telling everybody to get into the open lane, they still slow down at the accident because they want to take a look, but instead of going and creeping at one or two miles an hour, we're doing it at 30 or 40 miles an hour. You're not getting the backups you used to due to congestion. We were receiving up to 100 accidents a day. Some of them were fairly significant. They would range from a single accident to one time when we had 137 vehicles involved in an accident. They were significant. When you get to that level, you have an emergency situation.

Another thing that really surprised everybody was the partnership of all the different agencies. We had a lot of agencies that had their territories. They would not cooperate. They'd say that's your problem; you stay off my territory. When we were able to pull everybody together, we saw quite a bit of cooperation among the different groups.

Finally, a thing that really surprised us a little bit was we were looking for between 40% and 60% compliance to the messages that were on the verbal message signs, the lane control signals, because really you're not after 100% compliance because then you just create a problem elsewhere. But what we were getting is a very high compliance rate of about 60% to 70%. When we diverted traffic around freeways, we were seeing a large number of people, around 60%, diverting to the proper routes; and when we had lane control signals up, you almost had a 90% compliance on people getting into the proper lane. And then you always have the clowns who like to run up to the front and scoot in right before they get to the accident. You're always going to have that problem. But the compliance was very high and the reason is because the data was accurate, it was timely, it was real-time data.

What I want to do is talk a little bit about what ITS is. There's more than just a traffic management and traveller information component to ITS. There are actually 32 areas in ITS, involving rail, transit, police, and fire. What's everybody's role in ITS? How do they give data? How do they use the data?

This all started back in the late eighties in the United States. It was called Mobility 2000. There were two conferences. There was one held in Dallas and one in Houston. A majority of the state officials from the various states got together and looked at a question we had around the country. We were finishing up our interstate program. From 1950 to 1990, the focus was to build the interstate highway system. We were getting ready to complete that and we had yet to build our way out of congestion. Nobody believed we were ever going to build our way out of congestion because of the time and because of the money. So the question was what do we do in the future? What other tools are out there that are going to allow us to manage our freeways better?

• 1605

The whole focus was to look at the freeways as a network, because you may have congestion on certain freeways, but most likely you're not having every single freeway congested at the same level. So if we're able to distribute the vehicles around the network more efficiently, then we're able to delay and make congestion a little bit less painful early on.

Then the Mobility 2000 study evolved into what's called IVHS, intelligent vehicle highway systems. And some of you may have been familiar with that, because that appeared in what was called ICE-T, which was the bill that was signed in 1990.

Just recently, or several years ago, about the intelligent vehicle highway systems people said all around the country that the word “vehicle” did not really represent the clear focus on the future, and that is to focus on all the transportation modes, and not just the vehicles. So that's how we got to intelligent transportation systems, and that's what TEA 21 is really focused on. Look at every single mode of transportation. Try to make every single mode more efficient, and then turn around and integrate all that data. The power of ITS is the integration of data, the consolidation of functions.

What I want to do is focus on three areas right now. I want to talk about the automated traffic management systems, the electronic toll collection, and the commercial vehicle operations. It appears as though in the near term those were some of the areas this group was more interested in looking at.

There are other elements that we'll just hit on briefly, such the automated highway system, which are systems that are farther down the road. Public transportation is one we'll talk about a little bit, but there are other elements, emergency management and those functions.

Lockheed Martin has been involved in several of these areas, obviously all along the east coast, the south of the United States, Colorado, Minnesota. We're building systems almost in every place within the country. About two years ago it became obvious to the federal highway administration that everybody is out there building all these ITS systems, but somewhere down the road the focus was to be able to drive from the west coast to the east coast, from the southern border to the northern border and across the continent and be able to use your single system, so that when you leave one location it works throughout the entire country. Just because you leave a single area, you don't have to go buy a new unit because your system doesn't interface with the data being transmitted to your vehicle.

As a result, the federal highway administration went to Lockheed Martin and asked us to build a national architecture. You may have heard quite a bit about it, but right now the national architecture is what every single state, every single city and county is going off and building to. The national architecture shows what data comes into the system, what data goes out to the various partners, and how that data is getting out there and what are the standard interfaces. That study was completed about a year ago. The national architecture was completed about a year ago and is being deployed today.

There's been a lot of involvement in early deployment studies where a lot of cities and states around the country have been trying to figure out where they fit in to the national architecture. What's their role? How do they get involved? What are the benefits? We've been heavily involved in developing a lot of those, what we refer to as early deployment studies.

ATMS, advanced traffic management systems, is really broken down into two areas, surveillance and control. Those things are looking at how you collect the data. You have loop detectors, which are sensors within the roadways; that's one technology. You have transit buses that currently get you EPS information, so that if you gather this information you can pick and identify what the travel speeds are within those corridors. You have toll tags out there that are being deployed. If I put a reader in several locations, I can pick up the vehicle identification tag and identify the travel link speed. I have video centres out there that show me a picture of what's happening on the freeway.

So there's a lot of technology out there that allows you to collect the information. A lot of that information doesn't necessarily mean that the department of transportation has to collect the data. That data may reside within the transit companies and also the 911 interfaces. Whenever a call is generated through the 911 system, you know whether a major accident or a minor accident has occurred, and you also know the location of that incident. That information is of value to the department of transportation, especially in a rural area where you need to know where the major accidents are and what the conditions are.

• 1610

So just by tying into certain databases that already exist today, that information can be available to the partners and made of great value without the DOT going out there and continuously reinventing the wheel or doing something that's already deployed.

Once you get this information and you identify that you've got an incident such as a major accident, a minor accident, an emergency, a flood, or an ice storm, what do you do with that information? That's where the control comes from. You have variable message signs as electronic signs on the roadway. You may have an HOV lane, which means high occupancy vehicle lane. You may open them and close them through gates. You may have lane control signals, which are arrows over the roadway. You may have seen them in tunnels. In some areas, they're actually deployed on the freeways. So there are a lot of ways of getting information out to the public. We do that through the control of devices.

Then you also have TIS, traveller information systems. How do you get that information out to the public? Information about speed, incidents, and weather all have an impact on travellers in general. Obviously the Internet is one application that's really taking off. There are kiosks, which are also taking off.

But then you also have in-vehicle systems that are being deployed today. In TransGuide, we saw one that was an in-vehicle route guidance system that knows where you are and where you want to go. It will plot the quickest route for your point of destination. The reason it's plotting the quickest route to your point of destination is because there's a 3,000 real-time travel speed being transmitted over high-speed FM subcarriers to the vehicles. So that information goes into the vehicles and a person is given a particular route. If an accident or congestion occurs on that route or if the roadway floods, then a new route is automatically recalculated and given to the driver.

This is critical for people for whom every minute counts. These are people who depend upon transportation. They need to know that they can get from point A to point B within a certain time period. You have UPS, Federal Express, and a lot of delivery companies. It isn't only just for the big companies; it's also of value down at the lower end. A single plumber who can save two hours of travelling a day could do two more service calls a day. So it hits the single person also.

As for surveillance, there are lots of different ways of getting surveillance. In several cases, we saw traffic management systems where you get all the partners together to actually look at monitoring the freeways. They're making decisions. They're trying to monitor the entire system. There are detectors and video systems.

What's more important about this is not the technology, but the surveillance design. Going out into a metropolitan area installing inductive loops every half-mile is great because you can come in there and locate them close enough to be able to pick up an accident or congestion relatively quickly. But in a rural area, loop detectors aren't practical. Giving you the speed on a 12-foot section of roadway every five miles doesn't really do a lot of good; there could be a major incident between those loops.

So there are other technologies out there. There's what's called automated vehicle identification tags, whereby vehicles act as probes through the toll tags. You have commercial vehicles that have locations where you can identify travel speeds. Also, they're now coming out with new technology in which a cell phone can actually give an x-y coordinate even if you're not talking on that cell phone. So just by tying into that database, you can identify what the travelling speeds are for certain corridors off an infrastructure that already exists.

We've done a lot of early deployment of a lot of technology. But you also to keep an eye on what the future is and what technologies are on the horizon so you can take advantage of those infrastructures and not pay for the same thing over and over again.

Again, as for control, we talked a little bit about that. There are lots of ways of controlling traffic. Control is one thing, but then there's also giving the information to the public through what are called information service providers.

Say I want to give a data stream to a company, or multiple companies, and have them go out and market that data. They'll take the data I give them, and then they may add to that data by improving, enhancing, and repackaging it. Then they'll turn around and sell that service through cell phones, pagers, or other ways of marketing that data.

• 1615

Someone referred to that as a public-private partnership. The public gives the information. Then the private sector may invest in it. Then the private sector creates a company that goes off and markets it. You may have three or four within a metropolitan that are actually benefiting from that.

In all of these programs, you have a lot of hardware and you also have a lot of software. That's the key to everything.

I just want to talk about four projects really quickly. I don't want to go into any depth on these. I just want to really highlight what some of the other areas around the countries have done. I want to talk about two in Colorado and two in Minnesota.

In Colorado, we had what's called the revised model deployment initiative. This was the first step to building one control centre for the entire state of Colorado. Two years ago there were 13 independent control centres. We had two tunnels on I-70. We had a traffic operation centre in Denver, as well as one down in Colorado Springs. We had a transit company that has 836 buses tied to a GPS system that let me know where every one of those buses was. We had Denver International Airport, which had flight information. We had the city of Denver.

There were a lot of different databases out there. If you look at any one of those individual databases, there's really not a lot there. Each one of them provides a single function. But when you turn around and integrate all that data and pull it all together, then there's great value in that.

Another thing we integrated into was all the 911 systems around Denver, Colorado Springs, as well as the State of Colorado through the state patrol. So any time a major accident occurs within Colorado, the DOT knows it automatically because they're tied into that link.

Another thing is that the other 911 centres also know that data. In the past, however, they never shared the data. Any time a flight is delayed or any time the airport is closed, everybody knows about that information because it's integrated.

The tunnel may be shut down for many, many reasons. There may be an avalanche within one of the rural corridors. If there's a fire within the tunnel, everybody knows about that. The emergency response can be implemented immediately. All the partners are coordinated through a single system, and then the public knows about them also.

The next phase is a much larger project called the CTMS. This takes every single corridor, urban and rural, and ties them into the system to complete the state-wide system. This is also looking at traveller information systems such as the in-vehicle route guidance systems and the AVI system, which is automated vehicle identification tags. This is gathering information within all the different corridors.

At the end of five years, the Department of Transportation will have a system whereby they'll know the travel speeds on every single major interstate highway and every major country roadway within Colorado. That will also allow them to know every major or minor accident that occurs within Colorado. This will allow them to coordinate emergency responses with police, fire, EMS, hazardous materials, and a lot of different agencies, and to go out and resolve that issue.

That's the key. Going out there knowing you have an accident doesn't do anybody a bit of good. It's how quickly you can respond that really benefits the public. We could tell everybody to divert to alternative roadways, but you need to get in there and resolve that incident immediately.

Orion is another name, just like TransGuide. It's not a company or anything. All the different partners got together and decided to call their program “Orion”. This is a traffic management system as well as a traveller information system.

There was a lot of technology in this project that we had to upgrade. For the state patrol, we put in a CAD 911 system in their facility. We looked at the operation centre. We integrated the data. Then we turned around and sent that data out.

But there were some unique things in this project. We gathered all the information, and then we took it one step further. We created what was called an information service provider. That information service provider was a stand-alone organization to which we fed the data. They invested money to enhance that data. Then this private sector company went out to start selling the data to the public and the media by repatching and enhancing the data.

• 1620

It doesn't mean that the data we gave them is proprietary to them; we can go off and give the data to anybody. But what has happened is that the information service provider has come in there to perform the same role as the one performed by the Department of Transportation. It's just focused on a little bit of a different area. This company gives information out to the public for the public to make better decisions on routes. Instead of everybody going to the same incident and sitting in traffic, they're given information to look at alternative routes. That's really the value.

What's nice about this public-private partnership is that once they get into this investment area, this company spins off and becomes self-sustaining. So in the Department of Transportation, you've got this mini-organization out here providing the same function as the DOT at no cost to the DOT. That's the value in it.

Transit obviously is a big key in any ITS system. At some time early on in ITS, we looked at ITS as being only a DOT function. That mindset was quickly changed when we looked at how buses could become more efficient. The bottom line is that there are no more freeways in a lot of our urban areas because of our ozone. We have air pollution problems, so the EPA has stopped the deployment of new freeways. In order to improve the freeway system, we need to look at ITS for a better manager system.

Another tool you have is allowing public transportation to become more efficient. How do you allow this to become more efficient? Well, we've deployed systems on buses whereby we now know the location of every single bus within the metropolitan area. We can identify whether they're behind schedule or ahead of schedule. If they're behind schedule, then we're able to change the traffic signal timing in some of these locations to allow the buses to have priority through the signals and the ramp meters also.

So this allows the transit system to become more efficient. The thought is that if you can make a public facility like this more efficient, then the ridership will increase, because people can depend upon it being at this exact location at this particular time.

Then there are some added benefits. Unfortunately in our society, crime is normal. There are mayday systems, security systems, on these buses in Minnesota, as well as TransGuide. This is in some of the areas around the country also.

Then there's also route planning. How do you give people information on what the best route is? We've automated that.

Another areas in ITS is tolls. We have what are called toll authorities. These were quasi-government agencies that went off to start developing freeways on their own. They collect revenue off this also. I believe there's something similar here to some degree.

We also now have now private companies that are coming in not as toll authorities, but as investment groups. Lockheed Martin is part of one. We're up in Norfolk, Virginia. We're building additional tunnels through downtown Norfolk. We're putting in additional freeways. In that organization, we'll manage that freeway and collect tolls to pay back the investment that was used to build the freeways.

Well, we have these toll facilities in many locations. We also have toll facilities at airports. So they're becoming normal.

The thing is that you've created a way to pay for a freeway, but you've also added another delay to travel. So instead of that delay being a disadvantage of going down that freeway, what we're trying to do is make those facilities more automated and quicker. So you just drive by the toll facility and make an electronic payment through AVI tags. So Lockheed Martin is involved heavily not only in building these systems and doing the automated toll facilities, but also in manning and operating these facilities for the people who insist on doing a manual operation.

As for commercial vehicle operations, there are two components to this. Obviously, the area of commercial vehicles was identified early on in ITS as being a quick benefactor of ITS. In the past, every state acted independently. If you go to one state, you hit a border. Credentialing while transporting between borders was very difficult, slow, and time-consuming.

• 1625

So Lockheed Martin and some of the other partners got together and built a system that allowed a commercial vehicle to go through and register electronic credentials early on, get them pre-approved, so that a vehicle could pass from point A to point B across multiple borders within the States without having to stop.

You then bring up the issue of overloaded vehicles. That was another system we put together, which is being deployed across the country, called “weigh in motion”. Instead of stopping a vehicle and having it sit on a scale, we can actually weigh vehicles going 50 or 60 miles an hour. If we do get a violation, we pull them over. If they pass a system and their electronic credentials aren't in order, we pull them over. So you still have the checks and balances. But for those facilities or those companies that have done everything right and know the system and have built up a rapport and are doing it properly, their vehicles can travel from point A to point B very efficiently. So that's the PrePass as well as electronic credentialing.

Let me really quickly talk about some of the things we do at Lockheed Martin. We've been involved in ITS for quite a while. The company has picked this as a very important part of the company charter in the future. We look at this as an area that's quickly growing within the United States and has been for a long time. We also look at this as an opportunity for a program like this to succeed, because we are integrators, we are looking at putting together a complete design. We do the design, the construction, the implementation, and the operations, so there is quite a bit going on. We are located in almost every area of the United States.

But what's important in building an ITS system is not just the design, the technology, the communications, and those types of things. It's also an issue of how you pull all the partners together, how you identify who has value in all their different databases in their operations, how you can consolidate operations, and looking at it from an independent point of view of coming in there and trying to integrate everything into a single transportation organization. So we do quite a bit of in-house design, in-house services, software products etc.

We do quite a bit of software development. Lockheed Martin is what's called SEI level 3 certified. This is a level of software development. It's basically a rating standard of your process on how you develop software, how it's documented, and how well it performs.

We also have a construction company. Not only do we design, but we also build ITS systems around the country.

Real quickly, because this isn't supposed to be a sales pitch at all, what I want to do is talk about the benefits of ITS. There are a lot of people in the nation right now who are going off and building ITS systems within the metropolitan area. But there's also another component. There is a rural component, which is of equal or greater value to have ITS deployed, as well as commercial vehicles. In the future we'll get into the intelligent vehicle or what you may have heard of as the automated highway system.

In the metropolitan area, by integrating all these different devices and looking at the traffic signals, when a major incident occurs on a freeway, you divert traffic onto a parallel roadway, which we refer to as furnish roads, or a city street system. Those facilities are not designed to carry mainline traffic, but in some cases it's almost critical that you use those facilities. You can't just stop everybody on the freeway and let them sit there for five hours while you clear it.

You have to provide alternative routes. So what we do is we provide alternative routes through the other freeways by backing up far enough and notifying people to take alternative freeways, but we also have to divert traffic onto the city street system, whether we do it or they do it on their own. As a result, you need to change the signal timing. So what we do in many cases is when an accident occurs on the freeway and the diversion routes are implemented, the signal timing plans are automatically changed to handle that load. That's what's important about integrating the city as well as the freeway system.

On freeway management and transit management, transit provides you data and you can benefit transit. It doesn't do anybody any good for the transit company to be sitting in congestion or a traffic delay. So working with the operators and having the operators dispatch around those corridors due to emergencies is of great value.

• 1630

On incident management, I can't say enough about this. When TransGuide went on line, it was very good. We were operating, and we were very efficient in providing information to the public. But there was no greater value than having that police officer sitting right next to us helping to manage and resolve that incident.

When a major accident occurs on the roadway, most people will make a 911 call, and people have no clue where they are. Over 50% of the 911 calls were incorrect. They didn't know if they were heading north or south. They didn't know what freeway they were on. In some ways you may be heading north, but that's eastbound, so a lot of people were confused. So over half of our 911 calls were incorrect. There were several cases in which the fire department or police department were out there looking for the incident and couldn't find it, only to find out that it was a half mile down the roadway.

When the police officers and the operators got together, we were identifying exactly where that incident would come in. When a police officer would get a 911 call, we'd turn the cameras on and identify and validate, yes, this is where it's at. So it allowed their operation to become more efficient. Also, it allows you to help the departments clear the incidents. A lot of times we get an overturned tanker truck with a fuel spill. The DOT brings sand trucks out there to clean the incident up. So it was truly a partnership in coordination.

The next item is electronic toll collection. There are a lot of ways of becoming more efficient.

Railroad crossing safety is a big issue right now. I don't know that anybody has the right answers on how to become very efficient on those railroad crossings to increase safety. You have the federal government and the railroad authority, and I think sometimes they're at an equal level. Right now they haven't merged as a single organization to look at how we integrate rail into the freeway system. But that is a big push at the Federal Highway Administration right now, or the U.S. DOT.

The next items are emergency response, intermodal transportation, and traveller information. That is probably going to be the biggest advantage of ITS in the future for the simple reason that people who actually work and live in those areas where ITS exists benefit from ITS, including Canada where it is being deployed in Montreal and Toronto, because they see the information on the lane control signals, those types of things, and people depend upon that.

Somewhere down the road when the in-vehicle route guidance units are deployed—and they're being deployed now in the United States at a very quick pace, and I think Japan has about two million units deployed now—people will depend upon information coming into those units and being able to get real-time information from their vehicles over an entire network or an entire state or province. That's where the value of ITS is. When people become dependent upon knowing what the real-time travel information is 24 hours a day or whenever they're in their car, that's where it's critical.

On commercial vehicle operations, there's quite a bit here, and obviously electronic clearancing. Any time we can stop delaying a commercial vehicle, they become more productive, the goods drop in price, and it basically just helps our economy. Nobody benefits from anybody sitting in traffic. That's lost time out of our society.

On the automated roadside and the onboard safety monitoring systems, we have systems that are deployed on STAR, which is a system deployed by Cadillac where if there's an accident in a vehicle, an airbag goes off and it'll send an emergency message to a control centre, those types of things. In the future we'll have systems that will notify an operations centre when a vehicle runs off the roadway, and there are many others out there.

Hazardous material is obviously a key point.

So there are some very clear benefits to what we're doing out there in ITS. In the future we're going to get into the intelligent vehicle. I don't want to get into that now, because I personally don't feel that's in the very near future. I look at that as a long-term opportunity or solution to the problem, but right now it's premature.

• 1635

We just recently completed an automated highway system demo. Lockheed Martin was the systems integrator for that. The federal highway administration wanted to look at whether automated highways have a place in our society in the future. If they do, then what are the standards and problems? What we can do with the DOT is go out to plan for the future. We don't want to come up 10 or 20 years from now and find out that we have to scrap the entire system after we invested billions and billions of dollars in ITS. We want to know what's out in the future. We want to plan to it, design to it, and develop standards now so that when those systems come on line, we're ready for them.

Another thing you're going to see in the very near term is heads-up systems, which give you night vision. Those will come out on the vehicles where you'll have a better image of what's actually occurring out in front of you in fog at night. You'll see those systems come up in the very near future. You'll have what's called automated cruise control systems. These are sensors in the vehicles that will allow you to tighten up the travel distance between vehicles. If the other vehicle brakes, your system automatically knows, and it will slow you down. So you're going to see those things. When in the future that will be, I don't know. But you will see them in the very near future.

As for the rural situations, in the near future, I think you're going to get into collision avoidance. You're also going to get into wrong-way detections and those types of things.

One of the slides—I must have gone through it because I was looking for it—was on the rural corridor. I think I may have skipped over it. That has as much benefit in the urban areas as in the rural areas. The reason is that you have alternative routes in an urban area. If the traffic is backed up on the freeways, I'm going to sit in traffic for one or two miles. Unfortunately, it's sometimes even further. But I have alternative ramps. I may have a ramp a half-mile ahead that would allow me to get off. It may not be the best solution, but I have alternative ways of getting off there.

In a rural area, when you have a major accident or a major roadway closure, your alternative route may be 30 kilometres or 50 kilometres behind you. So by identifying where major roadways are being closed due to accidents, flooding, snow, ice, and those types of things, being able to identify that and get that information out to the public well in advance of them getting into that area is a great benefit.

Up in Colorado, a good example is Vail Pass. Everybody is probably familiar with the ski area. Of course, there's no snow now. But when there is snow, a lot of people are going up there. We also have avalanches in that area. That's very common. Well, when those avalanches occur, the roadways shut down. When that happens, we notify people in downtown Denver through the Internet kiosk with variable message signs 30 miles, 40 miles, even 70 miles in advance of them getting out there. We notify DIA. So there are a lot of things that actually happen in a rural area that have a big impact on people in general.

So there are a lot of benefits in ITS. That's really where we're coming from. It's an investment. This isn't free. I think if you're smart, you can minimize your investment, because there are agencies out there that have already got an infrastructure in place and are already gathering information that could help you, as a DOT, identify and respond to an incident.

It's not only for the public sector. There are private companies—we mentioned cell companies—that let you actually tap into those units and identify travel speeds or lane speeds.

That possibility is there. They're not doing it today, but it's there in the future. Every cell site in the United States—I think it will be in 2001 or 2002—is supposed to have the capability of identifying the x-y coordinates of any cell phone at any time. So there is a benefit if you integrate and plan smartly.

What I want to do right now—I'm trying to stay on schedule—is show you a video from the Minnesota Department of Transportation. It's an ATMS, a traffic management system, a traveller information system. It talks about benefits and how it's important to individual agencies.

• 1640

[Editor's Note: Video presentation]

• 1650

Mr. Patrick McGowan: I know it's a lot of information, but that's it. Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Thank you. It was very interesting. I'm sure there will be a number of questions.

I have Mr. Cullen. Mr. Sekora has left.

Mr. Roy Cullen (Etobicoke North, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. McGowan, and your team.

I have a couple of questions. In the last video there was a reference to the public-private sort of partnership, Minneapolis-St. Paul. Who are the private-public partners involved, and what were their various roles?

Mr. Patrick McGowan: There were quite a few private partners, but one that was probably the most significant is a company called Smart Route Systems. That is the company we talked to as an information service provider, where we give them information as a DOT and they turn around and repackage that data and market it through cellular, pager, Internet, those types of activities. That was one of them. That was probably the most significant public-private partnership.

Mr. Roy Cullen: But in terms of the partnership, the way we've been looking at it here in terms of our national highway system is getting the public sector involved with the private sector but having the private sector finance certain activities that are financeable privately, and having the public sector finance those activities that can be financed publicly or should be financed publicly.

When I asked about the roles I was also trying to get at was there any financing role that the private sector played, or were they simply part of a team that was contracted to provide certain services? Was there anything in it for the private sector in terms of a stake in the new system?

Mr. Patrick McGowan: Smart Route Systems and Lockheed Martin looked at what services we can free the DOT from. The DOT pays a service fee for Smart Routes; it's set up for I think it was $140,000 a month for 18 months, something like that. So they did pay a fee for services. And Smart Routes then turned around and invested about $3.5 million of their moneys as well as this service and were able to build a centre, the system, enhance the data. At the end of that 18 months the DOT is no longer obligated to pay those fees and then Smart Routes is out doing a service. So there is a fee of services by the DOT.

Mr. Roy Cullen: Thank you.

In one of those slides you talk about an automated location system—I don't know if I have the wording exactly correct—compared with the GPS. I'm familiar with the GPS. What exactly is an automated location system, as I think it was referred to?

Mr. Patrick McGowan: There are two. What we have is an automated vehicle location system, which is that for the transit vehicles that use GPS, the GPS allows them to get the location. The automated vehicle location system gathers that information and sends it out. So GPS is a component of AVL.

Mr. Roy Cullen: It's a GPS-based system.

Mr. Patrick McGowan: Yes.

Mr. Roy Cullen: Finally, one of the issues we're wrestling with—that I'm concerned with anyway, I'll speak for myself—is the number of trucks on one of our major arteries that goes from Montreal to Toronto and the commercial traffic on that route. There are a number of public policy questions there that we have to deal with, and other orders of government, in terms of the proper mix between rail and road and how to deal with this issue.

Right now there's a lot of commercial traffic, big trucks, going on this major artery between Montreal and Toronto, and I'm wondering what these tools... There are policy issues here, as I understand, but what would these tools do to help us try to better optimize the use of this infrastructure once we have the policy formulas right? Or can those tools help us develop the proper policy solutions?

• 1655

Mr. Patrick McGowan: Right now, the tools will allow you to regulate your policies. This has nothing to do with setting policy, obviously. By knowing where the vehicles are and how many vehicles are on the roadway, by having systems that regulate flow of vehicles on the roadway through what we call congestion pricing index, those types of things should allow you to regulate that.

I don't have an answer. We're not doing that. We're not stopping vehicles from travelling certain roadways, other than by regulatory signs or by policies or laws that would prevent certain vehicles from going downtown. So we really don't have that issue, that I'm aware of right now.

The Chairman: Mr. Jackson.

Mr. Ovid L. Jackson (Bruce—Grey, Lib.): Thank you.

You talked earlier about automatic spacing. Do you envision or have you ever seen a new method of mapping, or do you normally use a regular road map? I imagine you'll have something that you stick in a cassette player, some kind of electronic device. Is there any such thing in progress?

Mr. Patrick McGowan: Are you talking about the onboard map computers?

Mr. Ovid Jackson: Yes, something like that. I haven't seen any, but I'm just wondering about them. With the old map, as we know, you spread it out to look where you're going. It's not something you think of as electronic.

Mr. Patrick McGowan: We have what are called in-vehicle route guidance systems. There are several manufacturers, and there are actually 1.5 million plus deployed in Japan right now. You have an onboard electronic map that knows where you are through GPS. It asks where you want to go. You input the data on where you want to go, and it will plot the quickest route to your destination.

In San Antonio we're feeding real-time information into that vehicle so that the route that's calculated is actually looking at the shortest time to get to your point of destination. Yes, those systems are out there. And the future would be a zip drive or some kind of electronic device that will allow you to download the entire state, the entire country, or individual metropolitan areas, so that you can travel from point A to point B and hopefully never get lost.

Mr. Ovid Jackson: The trouble is that with a lot of these systems, everybody will be going on the same track.

In terms of your automatic locator, I know they have them on some cars now in case they get stolen or something like that. Is it the policy of the government of the United States to put them in every vehicle now? Is it that only some people do it for safety reasons, or do only some manufacturers make them?

Mr. Patrick McGowan: Right now they're an option. They're not being deployed in every single vehicle, but may be in the future. They are normally called mayday systems, and they are a service. As a matter of fact, I have one in my vehicle right now. If you do get in an accident or do get into a problem, you can push a button and your phone will automatically kick on. There's a company there with an operator you can talk to so that you can tell them what your problem is. You may not know where you are, especially in a rural area, but if you push this button, the operator knows exactly where you are within 80 metres, plus or minus, and can actually dispatch the proper services to help there.

Mr. Ovid Jackson: And if somebody steals it, could you turn it off as well with that locator?

Mr. Patrick McGowan: You can turn them off too.

Mr. Ovid Jackson: Okay, thanks.

The Chairman: Ms. Desjarlais.

Ms. Bev Desjarlais (Churchill, NDP): Just in regard to the cost savings associated with the hazardous materials emergency response program, does that fall in line with an intelligent vehicle system, or can it still be operational through the transit system itself?

Mr. Patrick McGowan: Right now, for the transit system, I'm not—

Ms. Bev Desjarlais: Well, it's TransGuide and the whole system with the roads. Could you still do the same thing with the vehicles, or do you have to have a separate system strictly in the vehicle? Is this referring to strictly something that's in each vehicle?

Mr. Patrick McGowan: On a commercial vehicle carrying hazardous materials?

Ms. Bev Desjarlais: Yes.

Mr. Patrick McGowan: Right now, for most types of hazardous materials, they are required to have very sophisticated location systems by which they are actually tracked through certain freeways. This does two things. First of all, it makes sure they stay on the hazardous cargo routes, that they don't deviate from them. Also, if they get into an accident, we know exactly what kinds of materials they're carrying, so we can dispatch the proper agencies to handle the situation.

In most metropolitan areas, the fire department is usually responsible for hazardous materials. For instance, in an accident that we had in the Colorado Springs, they were carrying uranium ore. Basically, the entire cargo was dumped on the freeway. They were able to identify that the incident had happened, they knew the location, and they kept the fire department away. They dispatched a different hazardous materials crew, and flew them out to the site by helicopter to manage that.

• 1700

So instead of having all these different agencies trained in all the different possible hazardous materials, you can basically consolidate things. You need to know what the manifest is on this system, though, and you need to know exactly where it is.

Ms. Bev Desjarlais: Is that a fairly costly system?

Mr. Patrick McGowan: No. As a matter of fact, most commercial vehicles today have those units on them. The trucking companies know exactly where their vehicles are, and they know how many hours the person has been on the road, when he pulled over, if he's behind schedule, and everything else, almost every time. The units are fairly common in commercial trucking.

Ms. Bev Desjarlais: Thank you.

The Chairman: Mr. Bailey.

Mr. Roy Bailey (Souris—Moose Mountain, Ref.): Thank you, Chairman.

What we're doing now is fascinating, isn't it? Through the younger people who can't look ahead, I can see that a lot of these things are going to become a reality. There's no doubt. The thought went through my mind with the vehicle's little tab in there. Indeed, it will be a compulsory thing that we have some day. I think it's just like a licence plate. That will go with it.

I'm going to throw two questions out at you about all of these electronics. One, what happens when we get an ice storm? What happens if we get a tornado—you get more of those down there than we do—and it knocks all the power out? It knocks everything out, isn't that right? Your cameras are out, your lights are all out, and so on.

Mr. Patrick McGowan: That's correct.

Mr. Michel Guimond (Beauport—Montmorency—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île-d'Orléans, BQ): The road too?

Mr. Patrick McGowan: If you knock down the camera poles, the road is closed.

We do have some redundancy in certain areas. It's mainly in the communications network, but occasionally lightning is an issue. You may get a hit on a camera pole and wipe out that camera. In some areas, especially in the metropolitan areas, we do have coverage to pull that information over.

For the traveller information systems, it doesn't matter if you lose power or not. Those systems will continue to operate, because you're transmitting the data out through a wireless communication network. You have what are called UPS power-protected systems, and they will still continue to send that information out. The vehicles are also still equipped with power and those types of things.

So the majority of the systems will continue to operate, but we do lose equipment due to weather.

Mr. Roy Bailey: There's another thing that I want to ask you. I can't believe you have not had any contact, any interest, or any experience with trains.

I have a video here called “Danger on the Rails”. We've talked about this for the last year and half here. Have you been engaged with anything having to do with the signalling for fast trains and so on? How come you didn't even mention it? We're used to trains here.

Mr. Patrick McGowan: We talked a little bit about it.

Right now we have a system that actually tracks trains as they come through a metropolitan area, and we're able to identify the delay caused by a train. In some areas we have trains that are probably a hundred cars long or something like that...I don't know.

Mr. Roy Bailey: A hundred and twelve.

Mr. Patrick McGowan: Exactly.

Anyway, they'll basically just stop. They're blocking intersections, they're doing a lot. What we are able to do is identify what that delay is, and we can put messages on the boards to have people avoid those intersections.

As far as integrating the signal crossing systems to another network is concerned, the railroad system in the United States is very reluctant to do anything. The reason for that—

Mr. Roy Bailey: No.

Mr. Patrick McGowan: I don't how it is here, but I worked very hard on one project. As a matter of fact, it was one of the showcase projects that we were doing in San Antonio. I was trying to work with the railroad companies, but they were very reluctant to actually do anything new because they felt it increased their liability.

I think you're going to see a mandate come out whereby there will be laws passed that will force rail to integrate into ITS in hand and that will try to increase some type of a safety program. As for what that is, we don't have the answers. I don't think anybody really has an answer right now in regard to what the program will be. I believe there will be efforts in the future, but right now they're not there.

Mr. Roy Bailey: Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Our next member, Mr. Guimond, will be questioning you in French. As you know, we have two official languages.

Mr. Patrick McGowan: That's fine. Sandra is...

Ms. Sandra Sultana (System Engineer, Lockheed Martin): I'll try to answer.

The Chairman: Mr. Guimond.

Mr. Michel Guimond: Mr. Morin has a French name. He will be able to answer in French with a name like Robert Morin.

Mr. Bob Morrin: It's Morrin.

Mr. Michel Guimond: We have a lot of Morins in Quebec.

Mr. Bob Morrin: I'm from the Irish Morrin clan.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

[Translation]

Mr. Michel Guimond: The other day, at the end of the committee meeting, I asked Mr...

The Chairman: Just a minute, please, Mr. Guimond. I just want to check whether they can hear the interpretation.

Mr. Michel Guimond: We have very qualified interpreters who are just waiting for me to say a word to start working.

The Chairman: You are doing very well, Mr. Guimond. Thank you.

• 1705

Mr. Michel Guimond: So, the other day, when we decided to invite you, I asked our researcher if there were systems of this type in the United States and whether they were operating. In your presentation, you mentioned projects in Minneapolis/St. Paul and San Antonio. It may be that you decided to do so. Our researcher told me that, apparently, it was up to you, but it may be that the decision was not yours; you probably did not come here to sing the praises of the competition. Our researcher told me at that time that, apparently, there was a system in place in San Diego, particularly for trucks going across the border, and that he thought there was also a system in San Francisco and Los Angeles, two cities which are, by far, bigger than Minneapolis/St. Paul and San Antonio. It doesn't mean that these last two cities are small, but in terms of traffic jams, no doubt Los Angeles takes the prize.

Here is my first question. Mr. Chairman, I have two more. Are we limited in terms of the number of our questions?

The Chairman: No, sir.

Mr. Michel Guimond: Is there or not a system in the three Californian cities I mentioned? Even if it's one of your competitors, can you give us its name, because we might be interested in meeting these people. In any case, I don't know whether you have any competition in this area.

Second, I had to leave the room to do a phone interview. Those who are absent always get the blame, of course. If you answered earlier the question I'm going to ask, Mr. McGowan, just ignore it. The absent are always wrong, and any way, I can look at the blues.

On page 14 of the English version of your presentation, regarding motor vehicle services, you indicate that there are some in 23 States and one Canadian province. Which one is it? Was that question answered earlier? The Chairman does not listen to me any more. That's good.

Here is my third question. Maybe Ms. Sultana could answer since, as I understand, she worked for the Quebec Department of Transport. Is this the system in operation on the Metropolitan Highway in Montreal, or is it a similar but less complex system? When you travel on the Metropolitan Highway in Montreal, you can see some large black boxes over the highway indicating whether there are traffic jams or giving other messages updated by the minute. Is this system similar to the one you mentioned?

I was personally in contact with a company, in Laval, called Infocité, I believe. It has developed a rather impressive Canadian expertise. It probably uses your software. As I understand, Infocité provides lighted panels rather than intelligent systems. Of course, I don't mean that these people are not intelligent.

Ms. Sandra Sultana: Which of your question should we start with? The first one?

Mr. Michel Guimond: As I told you, other people in your group can answer too. I find what I experience here as an MP very interesting. I improve my English. Some people are going to remain unilingual. As far as I am concerned, I am going to learn a second language at the expense of the federal government. So, you can answer in English, if you want. However, if you are the most appropriate person to answer my question, you can too. But you people don't have to answer me in French.

[English]

Ms. Sandra Sultana: Did you want to go over the systems in San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles?

Mr. Patrick McGowan: Okay, but my French is very rusty.

The Chairman: You can speak English. It will be translated.

Mr. Patrick McGowan: There are systems in Los Angeles, and they're actually very early systems. They're some of the very first ones out there. In San Diego, I believe there is also a system, but I'm not familiar with it. I do not believe there is a system in San Francisco.

There are 75 major metropolitan areas around the country that have been identified by the Federal Highway Administration as key to deploying ITS systems. All three of those cities that you mentioned are on that list of 75 cities. Even though they may have early systems out there today, you're going to see those systems grow in the future, because they are focusing on 75.

What was the other question?

Ms. Sandra Sultana: Actually, let me just complement that.

• 1710

[Translation]

We decided to mention San Antonio and Minneapolis because the systems in place in these cities are relatively new and advanced. They integrate several types of equipment or systems. These examples show that the range of systems where integration is a very significant element is broader. It's not enough for a system to be able to function on its own, for a single purpose. It's much more interesting to be able to integrate commercial operations, for instance, in the case of public transit.

Mr. Michel Guimond: So, if the committee decided to go and see how these systems work in real life, not on a video, you would recommend we look at these two.

Ms. Sandra Sultana: These are two good examples, but there are others.

Mr. Michel Guimond: In which Canadian province is the motor vehicle service in operation?

Ms. Sandra Sultana: In Ontario. On page 14, it's under CVO, commercial vehicle operations. It's in Ontario.

Mr. Michel Guimond: And what about the Metropolitan Highway in Montreal?

Ms. Sandra Sultana: In Montreal, there are four highways: Highway 25, the Metropolitan Highway, the Décarie Highway and the Ville-Marie Highway. They are all equipped with such systems.

In fact, integrated in these systems is a component called “advanced traffic management system”. This includes camera surveillance, variable messages signing—the boxes you mentioned are variable messages panels—and automated incident detection. Soon ramp metering will be added. Several components of this type are integrated. We also have road weather information systems, linked to atmospheric services.

All these components are integrated in a system designed to collect various informations and give them to users by different means. It's an operating system.

Mr. Michel Guimond: Is it your company which...?

Ms. Sandra Sultana: It was the Department of Transport... No, Lockheed Martin is not the company which developed it.

[English]

The Chairman: Montreal being ahead of Toronto, we still have the competition of the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens.

You just mentioned that one has something the other doesn't, and you're going to sell another system.

Ms. Sandra Sultana: Toronto does have a system.

The Chairman: It does? Okay.

Mr. Dromisky.

Mr. Stan Dromisky (Thunder Bay—Atikokan, Lib.): Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, I want to give a plug for San Antonio and the fact that they have done so much in this area. But if one goes to visit that city and takes a look, you're quite aware, very quickly, of the kind of planning that city has done over the decades, especially when you compare it to Houston.

Mr. Patrick McGowan: Absolutely.

Mr. Stan Dromisky: That's right. It is a beautiful place to visit.

I have only one question, and I know what the answer is already. Has the city—the people who are looking after this network—dealt with the Y2K problem already?

Mr. Patrick McGowan: I can't speak for everybody, but I know there is a big concern. I think where their biggest concern is right now is in their traffic signal system, more so than anything else.

There are a lot of controllers out there today who are not Y2K compliant, and unfortunately a lot of smaller cities are really procrastinating in getting anything done. So I suspect you're going to have some problems with the traffic signal systems. If there is a problem, what will happen is they'll go into flash. So you're not going to have wrecks or anything, but they're going to have to get out there and fix them.

A lot of the DOTs, unfortunately, simply plan to just set it back to January 1972, which is the exact same calendar, and buy themselves some time. You can do that if you're not in a payroll banking type of system, because it doesn't really matter that much. So they have a way of handling it. Unfortunately, in some areas they are so overwhelmed with their current workload that it's not a major issue to them right now. In other areas they are very cognizant of it and they've gone out and fixed them.

Mr. Stan Dromisky: Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Any other questions?

This concludes our consultation for today.

• 1715

I'd like you to know you are the first guests we have invited to assist us in this study, and the information you gave us is really very good information. I'm convinced we will be contacting you again for assistance and guidance. We will probably be travelling, and you have set the tone for a study that will be of benefit to all Canadians.

Thank you very much.

The meeting is adjourned.