Colorado Prepares to Install “Smart Road” Product by Integrated Roadways

Colorado Prepares to Install “Smart Road” Product by Integrated Roadways
A basket of sensors buried in the pavement will measure the speed, weight, and trajectory of vehicles that pass over it
By Amy Nordrum
21 Aug 2018

Photo by Integrated Roadways
On 30 August, a startup plans to add its “smart pavement” to an intersection in an industrial corner of Denver. The company has encased assorted electronics within four slabs of concrete and will wedge those slabs into the road between a Pepsi Co. bottling plant and two parking lots.

Integrated Roadways says its product, which can deduce the speed, weight, and direction of a vehicle from the basket of sensors buried in the pavement, will face its first real-world test at that discreet Denver junction.

The company can then use that data to alert authorities to accidents or prompt officials to reconfigure lanes to relieve congestion. It’s one approach to so-called “smart roads,” which aim to combine sensing and intelligence in ways that reduce the hazards and hassles of vehicular travel.

If all goes well in that first test, Integrated Roadways will replace 500 meters of pavement along a dangerous curve in Highway 285, just south of Denver, with its product in early 2019. The goal is for the pavement to detect when a driver careens off the road’s edge—the kind of accident that happens dozens of times every year on Colorado’s mountainous highways.

Amy Ford, director of communications for the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT), says that section of highway cannot easily be widened and is too narrow to support the addition of a guardrail. When accidents do occur there, it’s crucial to alert emergency responders as quickly as possible.

CDOT: Why RoadX

Colorado's population is booming—with 50 percent growth in the last 20 years and another 50 percent growth projected in the next 20. Couple that with some of the most congested metro roadways in the country, major statewide road maintenance, more than $13 billion in roadway crash costs each year and an annual funding gap of $1 billion, and our transportation future has significant challenges.

We can’t simply build our way out of congestion, nor will new lanes easily solve how we address the reality that in 2015, 546 people died in traffic-related crashes, and more than 3,000 were seriously injured, costing us time, money and immeasurable heartache. The monetary cost of all 2014 crashes in Colorado was $13.27 billion.

RoadX will use 21st century technology and ingenuity to solve our current infrastructure challenges. Bold thinking and bold actions drive progress. That means smarter roadways with more informed drivers and, eventually, self-driving cars that can communicate with the roads on which they travel.

We are tapping public- and private-industry innovators and advisors to help guide the integration of technology into Colorado's transportation system. That list of partners is already taking shape and will continue to expand as we grow.