Your editorial about transportation departments granting long-term toll road operating concessions to foreign firms like Australia's Macquarie Infrastructure Group (April 2007, “Leased to the highest bidder!”) asks a good question: “If operating public infrastructure makes good business sense, why are we getting out of the business?”

We don't have to. The public sector can improve full-spectrum service—not just transit time, but safety, costs, air quality, aesthetics, noise, and the environment—by implementing “intelligent” vehicle technology that's available today. Transportation planners could go beyond scratching the surface of technology's potential to, as your editorial suggests, charging drivers for the use of any and all roads—not just toll roads.

Examples of these technologies include:

Cars that communicate with each other. Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty adviser Seth Teller says it best on page 66 of the May issue of Popular Science: “If cars are communicating, no one has to idle at a light for three minutes again.” In the same issue, Jacob Peters of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California in Davis notes that “active safety technology that makes cars drive closer together would easily double (road) capacity.” Manufacturers are working toward this goal, deploying automation and communication technology such as drive-by-wire stability control systems, adaptive cruise control, and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. General Motors has been refining its V2V system, an extension of its On-Star global positioning system (GPS) since 2005. The 2008 Lexus LS 600h L features collision avoidance that varies response depending on where the driver is looking.

A comprehensive communications system would incorporate information from cars with the location and acceleration of other actors that affect the flow of traffic, such as commuter and freight trains and highway repair crews.

With drive-by-wire stability control, a computer controls the braking of each wheel independently to correct understeering and oversteering by the driver. Many newer cars have stability control. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates stability control adds $111 to a car's cost and plans to make the feature mandatory for the 2012 model year.

Adaptive cruise control, which has been available on luxury cars for several years, senses the car ahead and adjusts the car's speed appropriately.

Tying speed limits to passenger miles per gallon. Demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles would skyrocket if access to “fast” lanes, with an 80-mph speed limit, were granted only to vehicles that achieve 60 real-time passenger miles per fossil fuel gallon (pmpg).

With communication technology eliminating accidents and congestion in all lanes, manufacturers would compete on “fossil pmpg” performance instead of debating politicians on fuel efficiency “standards.”

Easy parking sharing. Parking meters with GPS transponders would allow people and businesses to share and sell parking spots by the minute.

A city or transit agency would operate a geographic information system (GIS) database of all the available parking spots and their real-time occupancy and “sold” status. Drivers would be directed to the nearest parking spot at the price they choose. The system could reward carpooling by allowing lower rates or closer spots for vehicles with high passenger miles per gallon.

In short, the nation's transportation needs would be much better served if the federal government offered incentives for manufacturers to deploy emerging technologies on a schedule that transportation planners can use to plan projects.

One way to remove timing uncertainty from the schedule, achieve full-spectrum public service, settle the technology arguments, and save lives more quickly is to showcase the capabilities of fuel-efficient, zero-crash, zero-congestion vehicles with a race.

In October 2005, four computer-driven vehicles completed such a challenge, which was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Project Research Agency (DARPA), the same agency that developed the communications infrastructure upon which the Internet is based.

The vehicles raced from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, crossing 130 miles of desert, mountain passes, and tunnels without the benefit of drivers or the use of remote control.

On Nov. 3, DARPA is sponsoring a similar race in a city rather than in the desert (the location will be announced this month).

What transportation planners need is a challenge for communicating, computer-driven vehicles racing in real-world conditions. Such a demonstration would dramatize technology's capability to ease congestion and increase safety, showing taxpayers that now is not the time for the public sector to surrender service to private enterprise, or even to employ the private-sector approach with toll roads.

Such a demonstration would show that the public sector can indeed provide full-spectrum service effectively—with the public's support.