Thinking Transportation: Engaging Conversations about Transportation Innovations
Thinking Transportation: Engaging Conversations about Transportation Innovations
Beyond Flying Cars: The Latest on Transportation's Tech Evolution
As he prepares to head out to Atlanta, Georgia, to attend the ITS World Congress, we check in with TTI Senior Research Engineer Bob Brydia about the latest advances in transportation technology, including recent projects in Texas and where things are headed with integrating innovative applications like artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles safely, securely and efficiently. Bob heads TTI's Systems Operations and Technologies Division and has more than 35 years of experience in transportation operations. | View Bob Brydia on Advanced Transportation Technology at the 2025 ITS World Congress
Howdy everyone. Welcome to Thinking Transportation-- conversations about how we get ourselves and the stuff we need from one place to another. I'm Allan Rutter with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.
Allan Rutter:One frequent meme about technology is the lament we were promised cars-- cars sort of like the cliche from the 1960s about if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we ... fill in the blank? You know that flying car meme may soon be displaced by reality, as unmanned aerial vehicles for passenger transport are being tested in Texas now. At the end of August a number of my TTI colleagues will be going to Atlanta, Georgia, to attend the ITS World Congress in the aptly titled Georgia World Congress Center. I thought it was a good time to check in with a colleague and good friend who knows all about transportation technology Bob Brydia. Bob is a senior research scientist and division head for TTI's Systems Operations and Technologies Division in our Operations Research Group. Bob has over 35 years of experience in transportation operations, technology, and project leadership. Welcome back to the podcast, Bob.
Bob Brydia:Thanks, Al, good to be back with you here today.
Allan Rutter:So I mentioned this extensive experience. How long have you been at TTI?
Bob Brydia:I am entering my 30th year with the Institute and still loving every second of it.
Allan Rutter:Look that--d ecades and everything. Let's first let our audience maybe get to know you a little better. How have you made the journey from getting a civil engineering degree to getting into systems engineering and operations technology stuff? How did you get into this?
Bob Brydia:Well, I started doing things with computers in high school. My college was the first college in the country to actually issue computers to their incoming freshmen, and I was the first class of that. So I was kind of part of the nationwide guinea pig contest. That should tell you how old I am, given the timeframe for that. But then, you know, I've always, kind of, continued to walk and talk in both sides of world. So, on the information technology side as well as on the civil engineering side. Marrying emerging technologies and transportation is just natural to me, because it's a combination of the two things that I love the most.
Allan Rutter:There you go. S o let's talk a little bit about what the ITS" in ITS America actually stands for. During the upcoming World Congress in Atlanta, what kinds of transportation technology is going to be discussed?
Bob Brydia:Well, as you know, of course, its stands for intelligent transportation systems. Now, in the beginning of ITS, that really started to refer to, essentially, sensors on the side of the road and multiple different types of sensors, whether it was speed or volume, or cameras and other things such as weather stations, et cetera. They would provide information about the roadway and the current environment. As we've gone on, its has become a much broader term, talking about all these different aspects of technology automation, connectivity, digital infrastructure, sustainability, mobility, all of those types of things. And recently, of course, one of the words our audience has certainly heard across a number of areas is artificial intelligence. AI has really been in use in a number of different avenues related to the transportation industry and is continuing to increase. I'm sure we'll see a lot of AI applications and demonstrations at the World Congress as well.
Allan Rutter:So talk a little bit about one of the things you mentioned there--digital infrastructure-- about how those roadside sensors interact with and communicate with vehicles. I'm reminded of one of the first projects I learned about when I got to TTI about 11 years ago. You were part of a team that was developing a suite of tools to help manage a massive $1 billion expansion of I-35 from Waco to Hillsboro and then later from Waco to Temple. This included radar sensors and crash barrels at the beginnings of work zones that could monitor travel speeds and detect slowing or stop traffic and then communicate that back to drivers. Talk a little bit about that project and the kinds of experiments and learning about connecting vehicles and the roadway.
Bob Brydia:Yeah, that project has fond memories for me as well, Allan. In fact, that project is still going on, as construction in the Waco District is still ongoing. They're actually on the last project to upgrade the entire portion of the corridor between Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth. So the project that we did, or the infrastructure that we set up, was really-- as you said-- a system of sensors that gave the information about what traffic was doing; i. e., the speed, the congestion, any backups, things like that, the binds that were going by; and we took all of that information and fused it together in ways that had never really been done before. So we were able to issue different kinds of traveler information in real time to the travelers on that roadway through different mediums-- whether it was text messaging, websites, or email alerts-- for folks that wanted to check before they left their home and went on a trip, all of those types of things. As we've progressed, we've gone to less infrastructure on the roadways and more of the crowdsourced data. That really cuts down on the maintenance aspect of it for the infrastructure owner-operators like TxDOT, and that's really a trend that the entire country is going to.
Allan Rutter:Let's talk a little bit about some of the new projects you and your TTI colleagues are involved in that involve vehicles and infrastructure communicating and interacting. I think it's now referred to as V2X.
Bob Brydia:Yes. What we did on I-35 was definitely an initial version of a digital infrastructure type of environment, and many of our audience members might know the backstory of digital infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-infrastructure communications w ith the USDOT. It used to be called DSRC, Dedicated Short-Range Communications, and now it's being used as V2X, vehicle to everything, and different technologies are in use. There's a whole set of reasons why the technology has evolved. We won't go into that. V2X is the one that's here to stay, and recently the USDOT announced three grants across the country for deploying and showcasing V2X technologies to improve safety and mobility.
Bob Brydia:So TTI was lucky enough to win one of those grants, along with our grant partners in Utah and Maricopa County in Arizona. So we're all working to set out a number of different use cases, a number of different environments in which V2X technologies can help the driver and improve safety and mobility. A big aspect of that, of course, is that intersections and vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and bicyclists, but there's many other aspects of interest as well, such as construction events or high curve- speed warnings or flooding situation, adverse weather, things like that. So we've been putting together the documentation to account for the design aspects of everything that needs to be done for that, and we've started to deploy the actual equipment necessary to implement that, and in about six months or so we should have all of our use cases deployed. I believe the other two grantee sites are on the same schedule, so we'll have some really good nationwide testbeds for these types of technologies. And one of the big aspects, too, is also working on the interoperability, so that we can prove that messages generated in Utah and in Arizona and here in Texas can also be read by everybody else and utilized across the board.
Allan Rutter:So, in addition to this pretty impressive project that we're doing with the Federal Highway Administration, we're also involved with demonstrating and helping the Texas Department of Transportation move into innovations throughout all of its 25 districts and all of their divisions. And I understand that you're involved in helping them coordinate that across the TxDOT enterprise. Tell me a little bit about some of those innovations that we've been seeing. I know we have been involved with the Odessa TxDOT district out in the Permian Basin. Are there some innovations in those same kinds of traffic monitoring and work zone communications?
Bob Brydia:Yeah. So that's a really fun project, and I really want to commend TxDOT for their approach to looking at innovation as an enterprise-wide need. The concept of this project overall is to do at least two projects with each district across a three-year time frame that focus on being, kind of, those homegrown but fast-burn type of projects, so they're not the ones that are necessarily going to be funded at a national level for everybody. They may be a little bit risky, but risky is okay, because you can learn from something if it works well; you also learn from something if it doesn't work well. And then you take those projects and you figure out how to scale them so that, rather than just being in use in one individual district, they can be used across the region or across the entire state as an enterprise.
Bob Brydia:Some of the really neat projects that we've been involved in. You mentioned Odessa. So in Odessa we set up a queue- monitoring system on I-20 that marries queue warning, which is basically a warning that traffic is slowing down and you're approaching the back of a queue and you need to reduce your speed, in addition to travel time and telling people what the travel time is as they progress through a work zone. We're using a bunch of innovations in that. Again, moving to that third-party data, and we've combined all of those information alerts to drivers within one system that switches autonomously. So once that data is known and the program is running in the cloud, it senses the changes in the traffic and goes ahead and uses its algorithms to update the messages on the signs about every five minutes without anybody else having to be in the loop and physically change a message sign. So it keeps the driver fully informed as to what's going on.
Allan Rutter:It sounds like it's similar to the project on I-35 a couple of years ago, in that it's a large, multi-project reconstruction of a major interstate, in a way that is trying to get a lot of construction done all at once so that it can be over with. But when you do that kind of thing you really have to make sure that everybody understands. If something goes wrong, you need to know about it.
Bob Brydia:Right, and every aspect of this that we do is an innovation and an iteration upon the previous types of projects and the previous implementations that we had. So in Waco, where I said before that we started with a lot of roadside sensors and then went to third-party data, well, that's now the standard that we're using in Odessa. And then in Odessa we've combined the end-of-queue warning as well as the travel times, which has never been done before. So now you have really a unified set of messages going out to the drivers on the road all being displayed on a particular message board, and you don't have to have one message board telling you the travel time and another one a thousand feet up the stream telling you that you're approaching the end of a queue or anything like that. So it really integrates all of that. So that's been a big enhancement to the types of systems that we've been able to develop.
Bob Brydia:Some of the other district projects within the large-scale innovation project have been related to artificial intelligence and looking at using machine learning to look at railroad grade crossings, for example, to understand when the train is crossing and to give that information to folks that may need it the most, such as emergency service providers that may need to go through that crossing to get to a call when it comes in. In that situation, the emergency service providers know an alternate route, but it's typically longer, and so they need to know that as they leave the station. If the shorter route is being blocked by a train, which now we can detect with artificial intelligence and determine the speed and how long it's going to block that crossing, we can give them accurate information as to which route they should go to respond to the emergency.
Allan Rutter:It sounds like one of the things that the department is trying to do is similar to, I think, something that was written about a couple of years ago by economist Cass Sunstein, which talks about nudging experimenting with something in a small scale, seeing how it works, and then going big, rather than trying to develop all the costs and benefits of something major before you go do something, Experimenting and either succeeding and failing fast and learning from that.
Bob Brydia:Yeah, I think that's a very accurate description of what the department is doing and I think it's a very evolved look at how the department can continue to innovate across this very large state that we live in and get a lot of information in quickly to see what could be applicable across the entire state by concentrating on one particular project within a district. There's 25 districts in TxDOT, so we have essentially 25 projects going on at the same time and we use our TTI subject matter experts, working hand- in- hand with our TxDOT brethren, to look at these projects to understand what they can do, to see what the benefits are, and then, once the small scale project is done, we look at that to see should it be scaled up to the entire state.
Allan Rutter:So let's talk about some other ways that we've been partnering with the folks at TxDOT about technology innovation, and one of those has to do with vehicle automation. I was in Austin a couple of weeks ago and both out at TxDOT's offices in southeast Austin, down by the airport, you drive by a facility that's got dozens and dozens of Waymo automated driverless vehicles and you see those in downtown Austin carrying Uber passengers. A nd then, of course, on Texas highways we've seen autonomous trucking companies perfecting their technologies, delivering freight, currently with safety drivers. You've been involved with the governor's CAV Connected and Automated Vehicle Task Force led by TxDOT for a number of years. Tell our listeners about what that task force is and what kind of parties are involved.
Bob Brydia:Yes, I've had the pleasure of being involved with the CAV task force instituted by the governor. The people that are in that task force represent state agencies across the state of Texas, but as well as the entire nation. In fact, we even have some international members. We have six different subcommittees focusing on things like safety, education, freight data; all of those different types of topics that are very critical to continuing to advance the technology and the innovation, but doing so in a safe manner, and that's really the critical aspect. That task force wants to be the single source repository for all of the latest and greatest information as to what's going on in Texas, working cooperatively with the private sector as they continue to perfect their technologies, as you said. But then part of that is understanding how people are going to use that, how people are going to want to use that, and helping that adoption of new technologies take place.
Allan Rutter:I think we've seen some recent actions on the part of the Texas Legislature this past spring that resulted from some discussions and activity of the task force in the last year. Tell our listeners a little bit about what got talked about and what that resulted in.
Bob Brydia:The task force does not make any legislative recommendations. That's the purview of the legislators. What we do do is look for opportunities, and those opportunities might be on how we enhance our workforce to further develop it to be ready for these types of new technologies that we're seeing. It may be an opportunity to work with our folks at the border to implement different types of checking of all the information that needs to be checked before vehicles cross into the state. So that's really where these types of opportunities exist. So we have a voice, and that's an important voice to the legislature, but we remain as a neutral party looking at best practices and informing folks around the entire ecosystem of the automated vehicles about the right things to do.
Allan Rutter:It sounds like it's one of the reasons why Texas continues to be a place where developers and manufacturers and other companies that use these services feel comfortable about experimenting within the state.
Bob Brydia:Yes, Texas has been very open to having these types of technologies, using that as an economic driver for the entire state and seeing how these technologies can help contribute to the increase in safety and the reduction in fatalities that they're looking for across all of the roadways.
Allan Rutter:Let's maybe go back a little in history. You talked about how ITS has changed over time. TTI has been involved in a lot of this transportation technology over our 75-year history. What can you tell our listeners about some of the innovations or technologies TTI has helped pioneer and develop over time?
Bob Brydia:You know, TTI has such an incredible breadth of expertise across so many areas. In the beginning of our organization's existence we worked on physical safety aspects of things, so we learned how to take the leftover paint barrels from TxDOT and utilize them in an arrangement that became the forerunner to the crash cushions that you see today on the roadway. We've developed and tested breakaway signs. We've developed and tested things related to guardrails and all kinds of end treatments for guardrails. We've done many things related to vehicle mechanics.
Bob Brydia:The capabilities of TTI related to pavement and that type of infrastructure testing and finding the right type of pavement for the right type of situation are well known across the nation. And then in the operations side, we've done a lot of these things related to looking at how the traffic actually flows on the roadway and how to continue to improve that. So, all the way from the early days of ramp metering to looking at HOV lanes and all of those things. We've also set national standards in terms of roadside vegetation and looking at the best type of materials to make sure that the roadsides are safe as well as beautiful. Part of the reason that you see wildflowers all over Texas is because of things that TTI has done to influence those types of roadsides that we have across the state.
Allan Rutter:TTI has also been involved in ITS America for a number of years. You're now one of our most recent TTI leaders on the ITS America Board of Directors. Tell our listeners a little bit about TTI's involvement with ITS America over time and what it's like being on that board today.
Bob Brydia:Well, as a new board member, I can say that it's invigorating and challenging and a wonderful opportunity, and I'm very grateful for it. I also feel, certainly, that I'm following in the shoes of giants and trying to fill them from the folks that had been on the board previously. That organization is a wonderful national-level organization looking to promote the best practices and the best aspects of how we improve transportation safety and mobility. I would note that they also have state-level chapters or regional chapters. ITS Texas is a state chapter of ITS America and has a very active membership. In fact, there's an upcoming conference in November related to ITS Texas, and so many of the folks on the board of ITS America started at the ranks of their individual state, like I did, going through the ranks of leadership in ITS Texas and then moving up to the national level.
Allan Rutter:What kinds of other people that you interact with and learn from?
Bob Brydia:The board's comprised of many different types of folks. Right, we have the private sector on there. We have the automotive OEMs on there. We have folks that are brilliant in communications. We have folks from other research institutes in addition to TTI to coming together and looking at making recommendations to national infrastructure and national transportation bills to try to continue to evolve the safety and mobility of our transportation system.
Allan Rutter:Well, it sounds like it's a really interesting time to be involved in this whole connection between transportation technology so that safety can be improved and mobility can be enhanced. What do you see maybe happening in the near-term future that you and your colleagues at TTI or the folks that you're with at ITS America? What's out there that I haven't talked about yet?
Bob Brydia:Well, I don't know what's out there that you haven't talked about, because we've touched on a lot, but I think the things that are really going to take place in the near future is certainly the digital infrastructure, the integration of AI. I think we will start to see more and more and hear more and more about digital twins, the concept of replicating a physical roadway in a digital space and then being able to test things in that digital space before you test it on the physical roadway. Those things can be very simple to incredibly involved, but they can also facilitate a lot of planning and experimentation that would previously only have been possible in the physical space.
Allan Rutter:It reminds me a little bit about some of the technology we've had a chance to look at on those autonomous truck operations where not only does the truck have a bunch of sensors that allow it to see hundreds, if not thousands, of feet ahead and behind it, but it's also in a digitally rendered environment that they've captured before they started the vehicle operating on itself. It strikes me that what you're talking about, digital twinning, offers all kinds of opportunities for not only better planning, but for better situational awareness as you're moving your vehicle around.
Bob Brydia:That's absolutely true, and really the types of freight vehicles that are operating today on the roadways, especially in Texas, are operating at the very highest levels of technology that we've ever seen in a vehicle and within the digital infrastructure that they are utilizing to move through the physical space. So they have run millions and millions of miles in simulation and millions of miles in real life. Every single one of those miles gets a digital imprint of everything that happened and they use all of that information to improve the next digital mile and then the next real mile in the physical infrastructure. So the developments of automated freight have been remarkable to see and are only going to continue to grow. And you mentioned vehicles like Waymo and other types of robo-taxi operations. We've seen them now in a number of different cities, testing different environments, different types of vehicles, different types of sensors, and all of that is contributing to the national experience as to how we use those types of vehicles to help improve personal mobility.
Allan Rutter:And it's all being done with ubiquitous cameras on everybody's hip, active both insurance and tort legal system. Lots of people are there to watch when things go wrong, so it makes sense that everybody's operating with their eyes wide open to make sure that progress is being made, both incrementally, and learning is happening with each successive operation educating the next one.
Bob Brydia:In my experience with the industry via the CAV task force that we talked about previously, I can state with confidence from my opinion that these companies do intend to operate safely. It's the only thing that makes sense for their business case. But I think from a more moral or ethical perspective they want safety as their top priority. They have established safety as their top priority. Nobody wants to go out and make a vehicle that is involved in an accident or any type of fatality or anything else. We're trying to improve overall life here quality of life, quality of the transportation system and these folks that are in the private sector developing these technologies are full force, trying to do that every single day with safety as their top goal.
Allan Rutter:Well, Bob, I can tell from our conversation today that you have plenty of passion for applying technology to improving mobility, saving lives, increasing the infrastructure system resilience. What are some of the reasons that motivate you to show up for work every day?
Bob Brydia:Well, there's many, Allan. I work with a great set of folks, right? I mean you and I have been friends for a long time and have had numerous conversations about all kinds of different topics, so I have great colleagues like yourself that are part of TTI and are part of our network of folks across the entire nation that are in this space trying to make transportation better. But transportation is also just fun. I get to do something different every day really in the life of a researcher and I'm able to walk and talk in both of those fields the information technology combining with the engineering and kind of the hardcore civil engineering and we're now seeing aspects of engineering and development of techniques and technologies that were never envisioned when I was going through college. So while that was a day or two ago, I'm very grateful and happy to come to work every day because it's just fun, I work with great people and I get to try to make an impact on the world.
Allan Rutter:Well, I really appreciate you taking time to join us today to talk about how things are changing and continue to change. Thanks for being part of our podcast.
Bob Brydia:Thank you for inviting me back. Happy to be here and talk about all the great things that are going on in the world of transportation, because there's a lot of them.
Allan Rutter:Bob has shared with us practical examples of how Texas is at the forefront of technology that is transforming transportation. It's one of the many reasons I enjoy being part of TTI--being around so much research that promises to improve mobility and increase safety.
Allan Rutter:Thanks for listening. If you liked what you heard or learned something, please take just a minute to give us a review, subscribe and share this episode. I invite you to join us next time for another conversation about getting ourselves the stuff we need from point A to point B. Thinking Transportation is a production of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, a member of The Texas A&M University System. The show is edited and produced by Chris Pourteau. I'm your host, Allan Rutter. Thanks again for joining us. We'll see you next time.