AASHTO Journal - AASHTO Committee Releases CAT Infrastructure Guidelines

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Committee on Transportation System Operations (CTSO) formally unveiled infrastructure guidelines designed to support the deployment of Cooperative Automated Transportation or CAT systems at the organization’s annual Washington Briefing on February 28.

The CTSO said that those guidelines envision all of the industry stakeholders and elements of the U.S. transportation system working through interdependent vehicle, infrastructure, and systems automation enabled by connectivity and information exchange.

The guidelines are also “intentionally expansive,” the committee said; building on work being done among public agencies, industry, and academia to develop connected and automated vehicles and infrastructure systems to support them; looking beyond existing concepts in order to create a fully-integrated automated transportation system serving travelers, goods, and services.

As the developed of automated vehicles and related systems are developing quickly, AASHTO, the Institute of Transportation Engineers, and the Intelligent Transportation Society of America formed a joint task force in 2019 to develop guiding principles so infrastructure owners and operators can more effectively support CAT development – and those principles were finalized and adopted at AASHTO’s annual meeting in October 2019.