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Road X Tracks Future Of Travel In Colorado

DENVER (CBS4)- As technology moves faster than lanes can be constructed, the Colorado Department of Transportation is looking toward high-tech partners throughout the state to improve the way we all move around in a new program called Road X.

"Road X is how we take all this emerging technology, self-driving cars, concepts like virtual guardrails and saying we want to put them together on Colorado roads right now to impact our safety and mobility," said CDOT Director of Communications Amy Ford.

CDOT TECHNOLOGY ROAD X (1)
(credit: CDOT)

Road X has a broad overview with many potential programs underneath it. CDOT has formed partnerships with companies, the City and County of Denver, and announced Friday a $20 million deal with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden.

"There are a million ideas, narrowing them down is really trying to understand what problems you're trying to solve here," said NREL Technology Deployment Manager Alex Schroeder.

"NREL is a big part of our partnership and how they do the research and how we put it on Colorado Roads," Ford said. "Either we could stay and wait for a lot of this to happen to us and the cars to show up on our roads, or we can show we're as nimble as we can be to make sure this works."

Road X is looking at programs from the practical to the obscure, like solar highways that power electric cars. One of the first programs could be modernizing the metered lights along I-25 on ramps in the southern Denver metro area. A similar test in Australia decreased congestion by 40 percent.

TRAFFIC
(credit: CBS)

"From Ridgegate Parkway all the way up to Broadway, we think the investment in that, up to $7 million, versus the cost of building another lane which is multi-millions of dollars, with that kind of return is worth it for the taxpayer," Ford said.

"When you talk about congestion that's also energy inefficiency, so we can really solve both these problems at once," said Schroeder. "There are some very basic things we can be doing now and that's just providing better information to travelers."

Another likely program we could see on Colorado highways involves organizing semis along highways.

"We're doing work with trucking companies looking at platooning trucks where you essentially have trucks working like trains, wirelessly communicating with each other and they can draft off each other similar to NASCAR, and they can get pretty substantial fuel savings, it improves safety and that's one example," Schroeder said.

"This is about technology in a lot of different forms, it's about infrastructure. It's about connecting vehicles, how do you put them together through technology," said Ford.

Jeff Todd joined the CBS4 team in 2011 covering the Western Slope in the Mountain Newsroom. Since 2015 he's been working across the Front Range in the Denver Headquarters. Follow him on Twitter @CBS4Jeff.

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