Eastern. Next, representatives from the faa and the national Highway Traffic Safety Administration join two assistant transportation secretaries to talk about new technology and government regulation. The Transportation Research board hosted this event. All right. Good afternoon, everybody. I hope youre all doing very well today. We are all very much excited to be here with you. On behalf of secretary elaine chao. To present to you on laying the foundation for advanced Transportation Technology. Ill let our panelists introduce themselves in a moment. We want to let you know we appreciate you. Youre a critical audience for us representing researchers and thinking that goes into laying the foundation for a lot of tho these advanced transportation technologies. Trv is a fantastic event. People who attend trv tend to be a wonkier crowd. Understand what were saying more times than not. Hearing from you helps inform everything were doing. Were very much looking forward to this panel today. We appreciate everyone that came to the Human Trafficking panel earlier today. As you can imagine, safety being the secretarys top priority, Human Trafficking is a critical issue we all need to take action on now and we also look forward to you coming back at 3 45. Of course, now well be talking about the secretarys top priority which is to engage with these Innovative Technologies to ensure that to foster innovation while ensuring that the publics legitimate concerns over safety, security, and privacy, are kept on the forefront. So, my name is finch fulton. Im Deputy Assistant secretary for transportation policy ive been working on these issues in the department for three years. Its fascinating and really everything that were looking at today has been my portfolio for the past three years, so im very excited about this conversation. To my left is james owens. Hi. Im james owens. Im the acting administrator of the national Highway Traffic Safety Administration or nhtsa. Obviously, in the innovation space, nhtsa is very active these days because its a very exciting time to be involved in surface transportation, i guess all modes of transportation. Theres so Much Technology and innovation going on right now and theres that presents both opportunities and challenges for any safety agency. Hi. Im jay merkel from the federal Aviation Administration and im the executive director of the uas integration office. So our role is to ensure that uas are safely integrated into our National Airspace and also ensure we keep that as innova innovative as possible. My name is diana roth. Im Deputy Assistant secretary for research and technology so in that role i oversee all the 1. 1 billion worth of research in the different modes, plus the 75 million in the University Transportation centers. I look at technologies such as backup gps in case technologies get knocked out and vehicles and Automated Vehicles. Wonderful. So the run of show for today is were all going to give you brief presentations to show you a foundational background of everything thats going on in terms of policy initiatives, Research Initiatives, regulatory initiatives, laying the foundation for our conversation, then were going to have some backandforth questions then you should see a number of policy staff around the room with notecards. If our policy staffers could hold their hands up, youll sigh these note cards. If you could wave them over, that will allow us to be able to take questions from the odd yaue to continue the conversation were having. Go ahead and submit your questions at any point in time. Theyll bring them up to us and so on. We do this because this is currently being aired live on cspan. So we need to make sure that we take questions, not take statements. If you know what i mean. So were looking forward to this conversation. And to start with how weve been handling these new and emerging technologies, you probably are aware at this point that the secretary announced the nontraditional and emerging Transportation Technology council at the United States department of transportation in march of last year. So weve been hard at work bringing in a lot of the research and initiatives that we have under way but also looking at how do we address new types of technologies that we havent already been established to handle. The technologies that close modes or ask new types of questions. Did start focusing on some of the types of petitions that weve been receiving, you see the hyperloop and nontraditional tunnelling but also making sure were incorporating our Automated Vehicle work in that. The policy initiatives, the outreach initiatives, the regulatory initiatives and the Research Initiatives, making sure we use this to inform the other types of work that were doing in the department and needless to say, our friends at the faa that work on drones are bringing in a lot of Lessons Learned and were trying to figure out how to better utilize the other modes to inform the work that the faa is doing. But theres a lot of learning thats been going back and forth between the faa, between nhtsa, between the federal motor carrier safety administration. All the assets that are looking at these technologies and were not done. This is not supposed to be an exhaustive list. You can think through new technologies. Maybe theres someday we need to include a scooter working group. A question i know diana has been thinking hard about. Any of these new things that may challenge some of the authorities we have or need to make sure we have good Interagency Partnership because we have authorities that touch other agencies. This is a single point of contact for anyone that has something that challenges us in a unique way so they dont get different answers from different modes or dont find the staff is lost. This is a good place for everyone to go. And i think weve had some good success so far and we just put out a request for comment that just closed on friday the 10th. We got 1,300 views of that in 26 official responses from commenters challenging us to be thinking of technology in certain ways so well be reading those. It just closed friday so we have not read them yet. Reading those, taking them in, understanding them, and well take next steps from there. Oh, yeah, thats the request for comment. We had 27 Public Comments. Not 26. So one of the things that hopefully a message that you got from you got from ces was that the secretary attended so that she could announce Automated Vehicles 4. 0, ensuring American Leadership in Automated Vehicle safety. This was announced just this last week, and what this is is it builds on the departments approach for safety for Automated Vehicles. We started with the corner stone of safety that was automated driving systems 2. 0, a vision for safety. This highlighted the 12 safety features that are important for Automated Vehicle developers to be thinking of, considering, posting, voluntary selfsafety assessments of these things, making sure public knows how theyre creating these technologies. This outlined and solidified the corner stone of safety that we use to approach all of these technologies, avs and otherwise. Last year, or in 2018, at the end of 2018 we produced Automated Vehicles 3. 0, preparing for the future of transportation. This took this corner stone of safety and laid the foundation for the department of transportation so we have one dot approach for how we engage with automated policies. Further clarified safety focuses and guidelines around safety, what is the federal role, the state role and the local role in these technologies and where do we belong, and where does the federal role and research belong as we work with new and emerging technologies. What you see in Automated Vehicles 4. 0 is a continuation of these themes. One of the bits of feedback we got is, well, its what we expected, it should have been. We took comment on av 3. 0, we took a number of questions for comments and we listen and we take those seriously. The engaged Transportation Community should have seen this coming and so its been fantastic the feedback weve gotten and we are putting this out for Public Comment as well because were always better off hearing from everybody and helping us tie the knots together. So one of the main take aways is that as weve been engaging with our inner Agency Partners and our partners at the white house, we didnt really have a perfect idea of how many agencies were involved. My best guess was something around 15. Its 38 federal agencies that are involved. If you dont know all 38 agencies involved, go to transportation. Gov av. As we look for the Transportation Future we want we have billions of dollars being spent on emerging technologies, on this research. We have dozens and dozens of initiatives going on to make sure we accurately communicate these technologies and make sure the public can understand what is expected of each Automated Vehicle manufacturer, what it means when they engage in public transit. What it means when he they think through fuel efficiency. There are so many initiatives that are underway that people werent aware of that even i wasnt aware of, somebody that has been pretty heavily focused. Were going to put this out for Public Comment and it should serve as a map for you all, to look at the assets that are in place for you to look as an american innovator, what are the tools in place to connect the dots and utilize the Government Resources to make sure america can continue to lead in innovation of technologies. 36 states plus the department plus the district of columbia are actively engaged in the testing of technologies. Congress has weighed in with the fast act on the types of initiatives they would like to see. The department has been heavily engaged, working with our state and local partners closely. Theres a massive amount of work underway. This outlines the federal role and the federal activities but theres so much more work to be done and we look forward to working with you all in this room on these things. Oh, it does highlight the principles in av 3. 0, we highlighted what our principles are that align with our authorities. You should see some of the same principles and understand the foundation for how we have been engaging but also how we tie the different authorities that we do not ourselves have. You see things like privacy come back into effect, things around system wide impacts coming into effect, of drawing together some of the Cyber Security partnerships that we have with dhs, and tsa and on the dod side on all the work theyre doing, the work the department of energy is doing on systemwide effects of efficiency of vehicles or what happens when you make a connected vehicle. All of these pieces are aligned for the first time under one set of principles. One of the activities that we have been using to inform ourselves, and again, im talking about the policy activities that are underway, will have some of our partners talking about the regulatory activities they have underway, and of course diana will be talking about some of the research and spectrum related activities. Im going to focus on the policy activities and the first is with the 60 million that the congress provided to us to inform and engage the public on Automated Vehicle demonstrations, we have put out grants that focus first and foremost on safety, secondly on generating the type of data we actually need to update our rule makings and standards for the safe integration of this technology, and third, working with our state and local partners on the types of operations they are comfortable with today, bringing them in so we have a coalition of the willing that are working together to explore what this technology can do, how to bring it into the system safely and how we can all Work Together. That is the criteria with which we judge these grants and weve got great results. You can see the map in front of us, the types of operations. They focus on rule operations, urban applications, tieing together different pieces, working with the people, with the communities of people with disabilities and those that have good understanding of these initiatives. Even looking at trucking applications versus transit applications, versus pure Automated Vehicle applications, we got it all. Weve got some fantastic work and probably many of you worked on these grants themselves. So thank you for doing a good job, and that made our life a lot better. Were very proud of these grants and now were in the process of cranking them out, going through the activities with the awardees of these grants. Youll see more things to come. The one thing i would like to flag since jay is here, a lot of things we learned from the successful president s drone integration Pilots Program we brought into this process, not only how we process it but how we execute it. A hot of things we have been doing that are informing our activities and youll see echoes of it, improvements over time as we learn from each other and as we have these conversations assen a agency in a department. One of my favorite initiatives that we have been talking through that the secretary did a great job announcing and her focus on accessibility is starting to drive through, since 2017, we have tripled the amount of research that has gone to accessibility initiatives and on october 29th, the secretary announced not only a number of research and policy driven initiatives but also more of the intergovernment work, bringing together the assets in the federal government, bringing back the coordinating counsel and accessing mobility for the First Time Since the george w. Bush administration, tieing together these knots, tieing together Research Initiatives so we can use all the excitement around technology, Automated Vehicles to ensure that were bringing in the communities of people with disabilities, to ensure were bringing that subject matter expertise so that we can have some of the deployment of these grants whether its the 40 million for the complete trip deployment grants that helps use technology for people with accessibilities that can go from their beds to their vehicles, or to transit to their desk back home, completing every trip they would like to make along the way. Not just working on curbtocurb but door to door and bed to desk. Its important in that technology here today, deploying that and taking Lessons Learned. With the Inclusive Design challenge, i love the mantra, nothing about us without us. That is us putting out a challenge to all of the innovators, to all of the universities to Work Together, taking the standards that are already developed, creating new standards, helping bring in this community of knowledgeable people with the actual engineers and Decision Makers of the innovation community, the oems and Tech Companies together to work on challenges so that were thinking proactively about the common sense challenges people with all sorts of accessibility needs, whether they be cognitive, visual, auditory, mobility challenges, bring them in so that we can Work Together to address concerns before it becomes a problem down the road. Cooking them in on the front end will hopefully help alleviate a lot of future challenges and lower that barrier to accessibility. We want to take those Lessons Learned in that program, and apply to todays technology so were not waiting on Automated Vehicles to solve all problems, and not looking for silver bullets. One of the things that we highlighted and you see this in av 4. 0 and the lot of works that james owens is doing at nhtsa is we have to do a better job of communicating what a technology is, what level it is or otherwise but what its real capabilities are. People riding in a vehicle, regulating this, members of the public that are seeing these things going on but dont know what they mean, they can understand if they get into a vehicle, this is a level 2 vehicle and what does that mean, the Driver Assistance vehicle. Youre always in charge or is this a level 4 vehicle. Youre not supposed to be hands on the wheel but paying attention. There is not a truly selfdriving vehicle on the road today. Nothing available for sale today. That still remains the case but we have lower levels of automation, increasingly being brought in vehicles that are improving safety today but we cannot let things happening with technologies be conflated with selfdriving technology. Not only does it ruin safety today and gives people Unrealistic Expectations of what their vehicle can do. It takes away the public trust of the technology in the future that can deliver the safety outcomes that we care abou