SECTION: CAPITOL HILL HEARING TESTIMONY

LENGTH: 1423 words

COMMITTEE: SENATE ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC WORKS

SUBCOMMITTEE: TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE

HEADLINE: INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM

TESTIMONY-BY: JIM BEALL, COMMISSIONER

AFFILIATION: SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA

BODY:
September 10, 2001

Statement of Jim Beall Commissioner, San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission

Before the

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Subcommittee on Transportation, Infrastructure and Nuclear Safety

Good afternoon. My name is Jim Beall. I have been a commissioner on the San Francisco Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission for nearly a decade and a half, and I am the current chair of the board of supervisors for Santa Clara County, California - the center of Silicon Valley.

Thank you for the opportunity to submit this testimony to support the Committee's efforts to maintain an adequate federal role in transportation investments across this nation, and specifically to let the Committee know of the successes of TEA 21 and to help the Committee gain a more detailed view on what ITS means for the nation's transportation network.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission is the metropolitan planning organization, or MPO, for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area - a region comprising nearly 6.8 million people, who reside in nine counties and more than 100 cities, in an area of over 7,000 square miles that includes the densely populated cities of San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, as well as the agricultural expanses of Napa and Sonoma counties. Making transportation work in a region as diverse as ours requires partnering with federal, state and local jurisdictions. It also requires that MTC, as the Bay Area's MPO, balance competing demands for scarce federal transportation funding. As MPOs around the country grow and the metropolitan areas they serve become more and more important to the nation's economy, they increasingly are turning to ITS services to keep people and goods moving.

Coming from the home of the high-tech revolution, I am particularly aware of the many ways intelligent transportation systems or ITS can be used to combat congestion and get commuters where they're going, as efficiently as possible. In Santa Clara County, for example, a multi-agency team, led by the city of San Jose and the county, is working to link freeways, expressways, local streets and public transit services into a 15-mile "Smart Corridor." Fiber-optic cables carrying data and video images, and connecting traffic signals, cameras and computers into a single network, enable traffic managers to spot accidents and congestion, change timing patterns for traffic signals, alert drivers to problems, and dispatch traffic control officers or tow trucks to the scene.

While MTC has been using TEA 21's flexible funding features to implement these kinds of transportation management programs out on the street, such ITS programs were made possible in part by 10 years of federally sponsored ITS research, development, testing and initial deployments. In that decade, ITS has moved from research and development of leading-edge technology to becoming a practical tool for commuters to make the right travel decisions.

ITS allows us to provide drivers with instant information about accidents or backups through changeable message signs and highway advisory radio, and to send extra highway patrol officers on the routes with the most traffic congestion, so they can be ready to respond to accidents.

To prevent traffic congestion before it happens, we've also upgraded and linked traffic signals to reduce stop-and-go traffic on major thoroughfares, and installed metering lights to allow cars to move onto freeways and bridges at a regulated pace.

We have implemented FasTrak, an electronic toll collection system, on all Bay Area toll bridges, to let drivers prepay tolls without stopping - and they can use the same device on Southern California toll roads 500 miles away. In the Bay Area, we also have installed roadway detectors and closed-circuit television to collect up-to-the-minute data on what's happening on the roads. The Bay Area's Transportation Management Center uses these high- tech tools to monitor traffic conditions and dispatch help as needed. The center also permits us to plan ahead for major events that could disrupt traffic by coordinating transit and other services and letting the public know their options.

ITS enables Bay Area transportation managers to expand the choices available to the region's travelers. For example:

Bay Area transit riders are just now starting to carry one card, the TransLink smart card, to pay their bus, train or ferry fare, under a pilot program launched by MTC to test the technology. The "universal transit ticket" stores value and automatically deducts the cost of each trip when the card is passed near a reader onboard vehicles or at fare gates.

Bay Area travelers can call a single regionwide phone number for up-to-the-minute traffic information on all of the region's freeways, as well as direct connections to public transit operators, ridesharing and other services. MTC also is leading the effort to make the Bay Area the first region in California to offer this service through a new, nationally designated transportation information number: 511.

ITS programs such as these make travel more convenient for the region's commuters but they also provide considerable savings in time and resources. For example,

- The California Department of Transportation estimated a time savings of over 25,000 hours per year and fuel savings of more than 55,000 gallons during the initial phase of the electronic toll collection system that is now in place on all nine Bay Area toll bridges.

- Each month, 50,000 Bay Area residents call Travlnfov - the regional transportation information phone number - for traffic, public transit and other types of travel information. A survey evaluating the service indicated that 45 percent of callers changed their travel behavior after receiving this real-time information.

- More than 10,000 Bay Area drivers per month use one of the 3,500 wireless telephone call boxes installed by MTC along the region's highways. The call boxes are a direct line to dispatchers, who can send police, fire, paramedic, towing or other roadside assistance.

- MTC's fleet of roving tow trucks - the Freeway Service Patrol - covers over 400 miles of Bay Area freeways, responding to 9,000 incidents a month. In addition to increasing traveler safety and reducing air pollution, the tow trucks cut congestion related delay by more than 3.5 million hours and fuel consumption by 1.4 million gallons annually.

Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, as you can see, TEA 21 is working well in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is important to note that Bay Area ITS programs have been funded by the flexible features of TEA 21 and other local and state sources, and not just by federal ITS funds. We encourage continued mainstreaming for such projects as a further commitment by federal transportation policy to better manage the transportation system that we have.

Our experience with ITS confirms that a federal program that is focused on broad national goals that no state, regional or local government could easily accomplish for itself, is essential for the further deployment, operation, maintenance and implementation of ITS across the nation, and that, given the fast-changing nature of ITS technologies, operations and maintenance as well as capital needs for ITS should be eligible for federal funding.

At a more general level, the federal transportation program must recognize that ITS projects are becoming essential to the safe, efficient operation of the nation's transportation systems. There is now (thanks to federal funding of evaluation studies) extensive documentation on the range of benefits that ITS can achieve for improving mobility and safety for our citizens.

We believe that the federal initiative in sponsoring a national ITS program was a farsighted move that will continue to pay positive dividends far into the future, and we urge you to renew that national commitment.

Attached to this testimony in the packets before you are more details on the high-tech transportation applications I've been describing to you this afternoon. We also have brought along prototypes of our FasTrakTm transponder and the TransLink0 smart card-card reader for display. At this time, I'd like to introduce MTC's manager of Transit Coordination and Access, Melanie Crotty, who can answer any specific questions you may have about how ITS is being used to improve the mobility of those who live and work in the Bay Area.



LOAD-DATE: September 12, 2001