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The 'smart road' scam.

Article Excerpt
So-called "intelligent transportation systems" (ITS) combine information and communications technologies with vehicles and public infrastructure in order to manage congestion, traffic routing, travel times, and fuel consumption. For years, ITS supporters have called for the technologies to be mainstreamed, that is, made part of the normal state and federal government funding process, rather than being treated as something exotic that is fit only for small pilot projects. And now, indeed, ITS has been mainstreamed. But mainstreaming is not always pretty. Just as paving and bridge contractors have often been chosen by less than the most ethical criteria, so at least one ITS offering is coming under some serious scrutiny.

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Poster child for ITS-under-scrutiny is the Transportation Technology Innovation and Demonstration program, managed by the Federal Highway Administration's Office of Operations. Critics say the program has been used to steer taxpayer money to a private company--we will use its present name "Traffic.com," although its name has changed twice over the years--chosen not by competitive bids but in behind-closed-doors political deals. They allege that the program maintains Traffic.com's monopoly control over traffic data and that federal grants are improperly used to "sell" the private monopoly's offerings to states and municipalities. And they accuse the U.S. Department of Transportation of evading legislative provisions intended to open the program to competition.

The Traffic.com story has been long in the making. It goes back 10 years to the TEA-2i transportation authorization legislation, one of the six-year mega-funding bills that finances not only general categorical grant programs to the states for roads and transit, but also "earmarked" grants that specify in detail not just their purpose and amount but who shall receive the money and under what terms.

The Traffic.com monopoly arises out of a provision in TEA-2I that authorized an "intelligent transportation infrastructure program" for the "measurement of various transportation system activities" to aid in planning and analysis. The law specified that the program would:

* be initiated in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania, of course, is home to Bud Shuster, who was the Republican chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee when TEA-2I was being hammered out, and a well-known dealmaker.

* provide data from an expanded "infrastructure of the measurement of various transportation system metrics" in more than 40 metropolitan areas at a cost of $2 million each.

* support private technology commercialization initiatives to generate revenues to be shared with local departments...

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