BRIAN CRONIN INTERVIEW BRIAN CRONIN Intelligent development As director of the ITS Joint Program Office at the USDOT Brian Cronin helps to oversee V2X deployments across the nation. Here he gives insight into the progress made so far and shares his optimism for this technology and the wider field of ITS T 10 Words: Tom Stone here are few truly bipartisan issues in the US in 2025, but road safety is one. With highway deaths stubbornly high, and an alarming rise in vulnerable road user deaths, the pressure is on to change what almost everyone sees as an increasingly unacceptable status quo. With a career spanning over two decades in ITS, including roles at Virginia Tech, Texas A&M, the Federal Transit Administration, and the Federal Highway Administration, Brian Cronin, current director of the Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office at the USDOT, is well placed to discuss the role that technology will play in reversing this trend – with vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology being key. “We’re really at a crisis in the US, and I think globally, around safety issues,” says Cronin. “In 2022, we had 42,795 fatalities in the US, averaging over 40,000 a year for years now. Our vulnerable road users – pedestrians, bicyclists, people in wheelchairs – are dying on our roads at an alarming rate, with nine to 10% growth over that in the last 10 years.” But now Cronin believes V2X is starting to deliver on its long-promised safety benefits. In November 2024, after years of industry debate, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) mandated cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) as the chosen communications technology for ITS by issuing a long-awaited final ruling. A total of 30MHz has been allocated specifically to ITS in the 5.9GHz spectrum. While this bandwidth is narrower than what was previously allowed – and narrower too than many in the industry were hoping for – it at least provides clear boundaries within which technology must now be developed. “We’re thrilled at having certainty so everybody knows what we need to build to and how everything should work,” says Cronin. “It’s that last piece of the puzzle that we needed to really launch the industry. The life-saving capability of collision warning aspects provided by cellular V2X is so foundational.” Cloud vs C-V2X While many connected vehicle functions are currently delivered through cloud-based services, Cronin emphasizes that the low-latency capabilities of C-V2X make it uniquely suited for critical safety applications. “We can get an alert of a work zone a mile ahead using cellular, and that’s great for awareness. But we’re having people die in our work zones. Workers are dying. Clearly, there are some additional tools that C-V2X in that 30MHz could really provide – another layer, another tool that is safety-critical at that last second.” Implementation is already underway across the US. “Right now, we have a cohort of 50 agencies that are actively in the process of tti March 2025 Traffi cTechnologyToday.com
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