A history of roads in Virginia: Intelligent technologies applied to highways

Virginia’s Smart Road in Montgomery County tests vehicles and vehicle systems under varied conditions, including rain and snow, which can be produced by the devices shown here.

The growing numbers of vehicles using the highways in the 1990s demanded more efficiencies in the operation of those highways. Early in the decade, VDOT engineers worked with national committees to evaluate the potential benefits of what became known as “intelligent transportation systems”—a whole new array of technologies being applied to roadways, vehicles, and traffic management. Often these systems were adapted from technologies developed earlier by the defense industry. Upon being named commissioner in 1994, David R. Gehr, a veteran VDOT engineer and administrator, secured a position for the agency as a national leader in implementing these new systems.

In 1998, under Gehr’s leadership, the department consolidated these evolving technologies across Virginia under a program called “Smart Travel.” The program included regional Smart Traffic Centers to help manage traffic and incidents; traffic signals coordinated by computers; Internet pictures of traffic conditions; a statewide Transportation Emergency Operations Center in Richmond; toll booths that automatically deduct tolls from motorists’ accounts; and truck weigh stations that check truckers’ registrations and weight data without stopping their trucks.

In a special effort that showed Virginia’s determination to make full use of technology, a “Smart Road,” the first roadbed in the nation built specifically to test intelligent transportation systems, was constructed by VDOT and Virginia Tech. It was designed as part of a new highway between Blacksburg and I-81.

By 1990, computers linked VDOT employees throughout the state and, by the end of the decade, engineers in several locations were working simultaneously on the same road design plans, via computer, without shipping cumbersome blueprints back and forth. As the decade progressed, solar power was weighing and classifying vehicles as they crossed pavement sensors—and there was much more. Surface condition analyzers (SCAN) were recording roadway temperatures, moisture, and salinity to give road crews critical information for timing their application of chemicals
to pavements during winter storms. Management information systems were keeping vast data on highways, bridges, signals, and signs in order to engineer safer roadways and maintain them more efficiently. Also, highway contractors were accessing project advertising schedules and viewing awards for highway contracts via the Internet.

These efficiencies were needed more than before after the department lost 927 senior employees through an early retirement option in 1991 during Gov. Wilder’s administration and when another 1,227 employees left in 1995 through a retirement option offered by Gov. George Allen. Both events thinned VDOT’s senior employee ranks and dropped full-time employee strength to about 9,700, the lowest since 1986.

Those losses forced increasing reliance by the department on consultants and contractors to do work traditionally performed by VDOT employees, and that “outsourcing” became a continuing trend. It closely resembled another trend gaining momentum throughout the commonwealth and the nation — “privatization.”