Opinion: This UConn outfit engineers safer highways - The Connecticut Mirror

UConn is best known for its basketball team, maybe even its academics. But did you know there’s a think-tank on campus doing interesting research on transportation?

Now celebrating its 50^th anniversary, the Connecticut Transportation Institute’s mission is to innovate on hardware and software to make our travels faster, safer and cheaper.

CTI’s Executive Director Eric Jackson says “we have access to a huge network of experts from all disciplines on campus,” though most of their $7.5 million annual budget comes from the Connecticut Department of Transportation and federal agencies involved with highways.

But this “think tank” does more than just “think.” They also train, offering dozens of courses for public works staffers doing everything from snow plowing to highway maintenance.

CTI’s pavement lab is designing better road surfacing that will grip your car’s wheels without wearing out the pavement. Highways that don’t wear out as fast means a saving on your taxes.

More recently they’ve demonstrated a truck equipped with reflectometers measuring how well the lines on the highways are visible at night. By prioritizing repainting the line marking that don’t adequately reflect headlights, there’s more tax savings. That high-tech truck will inspect every state road in Connecticut by mid-2025.

In anticipation of self-driving vehicles, CTI is opening a testing ground on UConn’s Depot campus to test the electronics that will let driverless vehicles talk to each other. They’ve already partnered with the Feds and CDOT to soon test driverless buses on the CTfastrak busway from New Britain to Hartford.

Some of the institute’s most important work is number crunching. They log 110,000 police reports each year on vehicle crashes by location and time, looking for patterns. Too many incidents at one intersection may suggest a roadway redesign, hopefully saving lives. CTI can even work with local police crash investigators to gain access to newer cars’ black boxes, which record speed and braking before a crash, seeing if it’s the road or the driver that may be at fault.

“We’re also testing ‘wrong way rumble strips’ at highway on-ramps to prevent cars from entering the roads in the wrong direction,” says Jackson. But he admits that if drivers are impaired, the bumpy road may not even be noticed. “Those drivers would probably drive head-on into a police cruiser with its lights flashing.”

To prevent drunk driving, CTI is working with CDOT in testing passive alcohol sensors built into the vehicle — not a blow test like a breathalyzer but some new tech that would measure alcohol in your sweat when your thumb hits the start button.

And to keep us all safe from over-tired truckers, the institute is developing an app to show the long-haul drivers where they can legally and safely pull over for the night when they’ve reached their maximum time on the road. At night you’ve probably seen dozens of trucks parked on interstate shoulders, so this might keep them (and the rest of us) safe while drivers catch badly needed rest.