Remarks: Deputy Assistant Secretary Hampshire, National Safety Summit @ Carnegie Mellon University

Hello everyone, I’m Robert Hampshire, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology and Chief Scientist at the United States Department of Transportation.  Happy to be here with all today for this very important event. Thank you to CMU and the Safety21 UTC for having me here.
This year, the discussion is around Advancing Safety for All so I would like to spend some time talking about what we at DOT are doing to that goal of advancing safety, but also, I want to hone in on a few key programs where certainly all, but specifically the safety focused UTCs can directly contribute and have an impact.

Let’s step back and start with how we want to frame safety. 

Realizing that safety applies to the whole of transportation, I want to use the National Roadway Safety Strategy (NRSS) as a base since it uses specific buckets to directly address critical safety issues. 
So, big picture—USDOT introduced the NRSS which outlines the Department’s comprehensive approach to significantly reducing serious injuries and deaths on our Nation’s highways, roads, and streets. This is the first step in working toward an ambitious long-term goal of reaching zero roadway fatalities. 
The four specific safety buckets being:

• Safer People: Encourage safe, responsible behavior by people who use our roads and create conditions that prioritize their ability to reach their destination unharmed. 
• Safer Roads: Design roadway environments to mitigate human mistakes and account for injury tolerances, to encourage safer behaviors, and to facilitate safe travel by the most vulnerable users. 
• Safer Vehicles: Expand the availability of vehicle systems and features that help to prevent crashes and minimize the impact of crashes on both occupants and non-occupants. 
• Safer Speeds: Promote safer speeds in all roadway environments through a combination of thoughtful, context-appropriate roadway design, targeted education and outreach campaigns, and enforcement.
• There is also a fifth element. Post-Crash Care: Enhance the survivability of crashes through expedient access to emergency medical care, while creating a safe working environment for vital first responders and preventing secondary crashes through robust traffic incident management practices.

I want to use the NRSS to frame the conversation because not only is it an excellent framework, but the whole of it is based on Safe System Approach as the guiding paradigm which is this idea that we all share responsibility—government, researchers, industry, travelers, etc. for prevention and that safety is proactive. 
So, as we talk about programming and undertake our research even after today this is something to think about. 

We have been very busy these last few months at USDOT and especially within my office OST-R and I’m excited to share some of the things we’ve been working on especially in the context of safety. 

We’ll start with ARPA-I since I know you all are excited to talk about it. As a quick background:
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law authorized the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Infrastructure, or ARPA-I – a new agency at DOT focusing on transportation and its infrastructure – an agency that is modeled directly on ARPA-E (for Energy) and DARPA (for defense).    
We are incredibly enthusiastic about ARPA-I – we believe that it will foster a new ecosystem of infrastructure innovators to develop technologies, systems, and capabilities that will transform the nation’s infrastructure (both physical and digital).    

It will enable us to more quickly and effectively build a transportation system that reflects our values – one that is safe, equitable, sustainable, resilient, and strengthens our economy. 
ARPA-I exclusively focuses on externally funded, high-risk, high-reward R&D projects that are undertaken by teams from industry, academia, innovators, and entrepreneurs – to solve targeted problems where current efforts have fallen short or do not exist yet; As such we expect that ARPA-I will create entirely new industries and paradigms and open new windows of opportunity with the UTC community.

Part of the ARPA-I model includes innovative procurement and project design to accelerate impact – that means performance-based procurement, prize challenges, and other competitive and nimble arrangements. 
In January we awarded the first round of prizes for the Intersection Safety Challenge. We had 15 winners—including seven of our UTC members.

• Ohio State, which is a part of the Safety21 UTC, 
• University of California Riverside—a consortia member of the UTC for Railway Safety,
• and University of Michigan—which is the lead on the Region 5 UTC, Center for Connected and Automated Transportation (CCAT) 
• All three of these specifically safety focused UTCs were among the winners. So, congratulations to them. 

If you’re less familiar, the Challenge aims to transform roadway intersection safety by incentivizing new and emerging technologies that identify and address unsafe conditions involving vehicles, and vulnerable road users at intersections—predictive systems, sensor and AI technologies, and multimodal tracking projects for example.

I’m sure you are aware of the numbers but in 2021, a year when vehicle travel was down overall, 42,915 people died in motor vehicle crashes—more than 100 deaths per day. Millions more were injured. About a quarter of roadway fatalities happen at or near intersections so that’s more than 10,000 mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons that we lose.
So the challenge—which is a joint effort across multiple OST-R operating agencies, ensures that DOT continues to promote innovative research and development (R&D) and safety efforts; as well as create foundational technologies, tools and methods that will enhance transportation planning decisions, infrastructure design, and traffic signaling systems to improve intersection safety. We can’t afford to have that kind of preventable loss on our roads.

Along the same lines, we recently opened Complete Streets AI (CSAI). The Complete Streets AI Initiative is a $15 million multi-phase effort to develop a powerful new decision-support tool for state, local and tribal transportation agencies to assist in the siting, design, and deployment of Complete Streets in our communities. 
This is a bold effort to build out that data along with the technology platforms that make it easy to use. CSAI is open until May, and I would definitely encourage partnerships and involvement from our UTCs. I can provide additional information about this at the end. 

In the bucket of safer vehicles, we are witnessing and building towards a future of transformative transportation with the rise of electric and autonomous vehicles, which can be part of the larger safety loop, but also with that, an evolution from paved roads and concrete bridges to sensors, data, software, and algorithms.  
We’re seeing rapid deployments in automation, connected technologies, mobility on demand, and sustainable and resilient technologies. And this is where we start to get into digital connectivity. Which brings me to V2X. 
On the Federal end we’ve been working with other federal agencies on the vehicle connectivity pieces. We want to ensure that CV2X tech works to warn drivers as well as protect cyclists and pedestrians and that all the pieces are synchronous. 

While we are tech neutral, we remain committed to the idea that road safety is for all Americans, and we’ll continue our work to facilitate applications that help achieve our mission to promote safety and mobility.
And this is where our National V2X Deployment plan comes in. 
The plan was released in February and was developed with a vision, goals, and milestones—including for R&D coinciding with facilitating national deployment.
As part of this, USDOT established the Interoperable Connectivity Cohort, which currently has 31 entities as members. This Cohort allows private sector, public sector, and academia to share insights and best practices related to the deployment of V2X. 

In other words, we want input and collaboration with our university partners to advance deployment of this important technology to save lives with connectivity, especially for vulnerable road users.

We’re also funding public sector agencies through various channels—just last month (March) the Department’s SMART Grants Program awarded $54 million (for a total of $148 million to date) to help public sector agencies deploy advanced smart community technologies across multiple modes including transit, freight, and advanced air mobility, as well as deployment of smart traffic signals, sensors, and curb management solutions and digital infrastructure projects. 
In that latest batch there are seven recipients that are working with V2X technologies and another nine that focused on safety—for example:

• Improving Safety & Efficiency through Connected Intersections Technologies
• Artificial Intelligence for Light Rail and Grade Crossing Safety and
• Leveraging Advanced Adaptive Signal Timing for Freight to Improve Safety, Climate, and Mobility

While these are again public sector, several of our state and city SMART grant recipients are collaborating with university partners which I highly encourage.

I know I’m talking about opportunities but the underpin to all that we do and should be doing is safety. Safety is our cornerstone of all modes of transportation and cannot be taken for granted. It really is something we should take into account with all of our decision making, and these discussions on how to make the transportation system safer are so important – so thank you for what you all do.

Yes, we have opportunities, but the real opportunity is for all of us—collectively and collaboratively to transform our system into one that pushes the boundaries of how we imagine transportation to achieve our shared equity, climate, and economic development goals, and reflects the kind of innovative and transformative ideas this nation needs, but above all is safe. 

Thank you all… I want to leave some time open for questions.