Earlier this year, a commercial airline crash over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., claimed the lives of 67 people, and cast a critical spotlight on America’s outdated air traffic control systems. As federal safety investigators went to work, the administration, members of Congress, and the media began asking the same questions: what went wrong, and how can we prevent another tragedy like this from happening again?
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and its severely outdated IT systems raised alarms. Multiple FAA systems suffer from system obsolescence; essentially, they are so old that software updates are unavailable, or hardware is nearly impossible to replace. Calling attention to this antiquated tech, U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent a clarion call to Congress to modernize the FAA, moving it away from the “floppy disks, copper wires, and rotary phones” the agency still relies on today. Lawmakers responded with $12.5 billion toward FAA modernization efforts in the One Big Beautiful Bill.
The national conversation about the FAA’s outdated IT systems has underlined the inseparable link between modernization and the ability of our transportation systems to safely and efficiently meet the growing demands of 21st-century travel. Most would agree that the FAA’s reliance on aging technologies for critical systems like plane detection, runway surveillance, pilot communications, and weather radar risks its core mission of ensuring the safety and efficiency of air travel across America’s skies.
Now, as Congressional lawmakers craft the next surface transportation reauthorization, they should apply the same logic and principles driving FAA modernization to modernize our roads, highways, and bridges, which claim more than 40,000 American lives each year.
Despite investing billions of taxpayer dollars into safety-related upgrades and programs, the death toll on America’s roads remains unacceptably high. That’s because our longstanding approach to road safety is fundamentally flawed. In plain terms, we wait for crashes to happen, then eventually decide to do something about them. As a result, every year, thousands of families lose their loved ones, while countless others experience life-altering injuries. U.S. taxpayers also pay hundreds of billions of dollars annually in related economic costs.
Clearly, America’s national road safety strategy is long overdue for an update to its “crash-first, fix later” model. Telematics, AI, and other predictive analytics can help transportation agencies shift to a proactive, preventive approach that’s fit to meet the growing travel demands of this century. These technologies combine aggregated, anonymized data sourced across millions of road users to offer real-time insights on current road conditions and driver behavior.
Now, imagine if federal, state, and local transportation decision-makers could use those tools and data to identify prevalent driving risks and forecast potential risks before tragedy strikes. Moreover, integrating these tech solutions into our federal highway safety programs would help maximize taxpayer dollars and deliver better outcomes at lower costs—empowering states to harness data to build safer, smarter roads that meet their unique challenges and needs.
Congress must help transportation agencies realize these benefits in the next surface reauthorization bill by expanding funding eligibility in core highway safety programs to encourage the use of telematics, artificial intelligence, and other predictive analytics. These capabilities can be used not only to investigate crashes after they occur, but also to proactively identify and address risks before tragedy strikes. Ensuring funding for their deployment in risk modeling, planning, and performance measurement would ensure every state can harness modern, evidence-based safety strategies to save lives.
Encouragingly, we can already see that momentum is building for these data-driven solutions. In July, the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development (THUD) report included a provision directing the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) to develop an agency-wide policy for integrating mobile telematics, AI, and predictive analytics into its safety mission. These tools will improve how USDOT—and by extension state departments of Transportation—evaluate risk, allocate funding, and deliver infrastructure projects nationwide.
Now, Congress holds the keys to accelerating this shift to state and local transportation agencies nationwide. Expanding access to modern tools and smarter data will empower transportation agencies at every level to evolve beyond legacy systems—whatever their own “floppy disks” may be—and embrace the data-driven decision-making needed to build a safer, more efficient surface transportation system for all road users today.
Heartbreaking stories and statistics have shown that outdated transportation systems inflict a costly, deadly toll. But we don’t have to accept the status quo and wait for crashes to occur to determine the solutions we need. We have proven technologies that can help us determine and deliver solutions now, and build the safer and efficient roads we need for tomorrow.
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