Skip to main content

More cooperation, fewer barriers

Increasing cooperation between the public and private sector and a less rigid approach to standards formulation are the keys to transportation’s future, according to Chris Vein, the Deputy White House Chief Technology Officer.
May 21, 2012 Read time: 2 mins
Increasing cooperation between the public and private sector and a less rigid approach to standards formulation are the keys to transportation’s future, according to Chris Vein, the Deputy White House Chief Technology Officer.

Vein was speaking yesterday during a roundtable panel on innovation and transportation which also included ITS America’s President and CEO Scott Belcher, 1984 Verizon’s Vice President – Telematics Martin T. Thall and Robert Brown, Vice President Sustainability, Environment and Safety Engineering with 278 Ford Motor Company.

Expanding on the theme of Open Innovation, Vein talked about efforts to make data held by federal government more readily available to entrepreneurs in order to facilitate the solving of the issues which currently bedevil our transportation networks. He also touched on the concept of consensus standards definition as a faster means of development than the more traditional, bureaucratic, government-led processes. However, he warned, any such efforts have to be done with intelligence “so that we don’t have too many people doing too many things”.

Government has to recognise that the private sector often knows best what the solutions to a problem may be, he continued, adding that public-private cooperation offers increased opportunities to solve issues such as distracted driving and improve safety.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Progress towards a pan-European cooperative infrastructure
    July 17, 2012
    Kallistratos Dionelis, General Secretary of ASECAP, makes the case for a lightly regulated, staged progression towards a pan-European cooperative infrastructure environment, the achievement of which should look to engender cooperation between the public and private sectors. Such an approach, he says, is the only real path to success.
  • ITS projects deliver return on investment
    December 3, 2012
    Light is being shed on where the real return on investment is today – growing, tangible, revenue-generating markets like ITS. There is a great deal of investment going on within the ITS space, and a great deal of external interest in investing in ITS,” says Scott Belcher, President and CEO of ITS America, which has been connecting investors with technology firms ripe for investment. Interested parties include the leading investment banking firm Raymond James. Its managing director, Gary Downing says: “ITS i
  • Atlanta ponders Mobility as a Service for seamless transit
    June 29, 2018
    Drivers in Atlanta spent 70 hours in peak-time traffic jams last year. As the MaaS Market conference moves to the US’s fourth most congested city, we ask how Mobility as a Service can help. Colin Sowman winds down his window to listen. It is not by accident that ITS International’s first MaaS Market conference outside London is being hosted in Atlanta. The event is being supported by Georgia State Road & Tollway Authority and the City of Atlanta – and again not without a reason as metro Atlanta is looking
  • US IntelliDrive cooperative infrastructure programme
    February 2, 2012
    The 'rebranding' of the US's Vehicle-Infrastructure Integration programme as IntelliDrive marks an effort to make the whole undertaking more accessible both in terms of nomenclature and technology. Shelley Row, director of the ITS Joint Program Office within USDOT's Research and Innovative Technology Administration, talks about the changes