The size of the smart highway market is expected to reach just over $18.5 billion in the next four years—a significant jump from where things stood in 2019 when the figure was just under $7 billion.
According to a new report, U.S. Smart Highway Market, published by the research company Report Ocean, the overall market for highways that incorporate electronic technologies has been growing at an impressive annual growth rate of 18.2% in the last four years and is expected to maintain that pace until at least 2026.
A separate report, Smart Highways Market Size, published by the company Market Research Future, is anticipating an equally buoyant market, with an annual growth rate of 18.7% heading into the year 2030.
And yet a third report, published by Allied Marketing Research, is forecasting an annual growth rate of 17.3% in the smart highway construction market for the next seven years. That report, Smart Highway Construction Market, also notes that the similarly growing smart cities movement has helped to accelerate the smart highways movement.
Perhaps a popular catch-all phrase, smart highways comprise dozens of new technologies designed to make traveling smoother and safer.
The electronic technologies comprising the smart highway movement see the use of high-tech street lighting and traffic lights, as well as the operation of connected and autonomous vehicles.
Smart highway technology has also been used to improve mass transit systems and reduce driving times.
In essence, notes the publication Make Use Of : “Just as cars and trucks are getting smarter and more autonomous, we can expect the roads we drive on to get smarter.”
And smart highway technology can take many forms: for years highway toll booths would “require you to slow down at a gate and hand bills or coins to an attendant or toss the correct change into a bucket,” writes reporter Susan Meyer in the site The Zebra.
“Now, electronic tollways make it easy to maintain a consistent speed while still paying the toll,” continues Meyer, noting that the placement of a small device or sticker on a vehicle’s windshield that’s detected by video imaging treatment or thermal cameras has the potential of “making the entire transaction seamless.”
The smart highways movement, experts point out, has been around in at least concept form for decades. In the mid-1990s an experimental smart highway was built on a portion of Interstate 15 in southern California, as authorized by the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficient Act. But funding limited the length of the project.
Perhaps the earliest version of the idea was on display in the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. The “Futurama” exhibit showed cars traversing highways guided by radio-controlled electromagnetic fields and operated via roadway magnetized metal spikes.
By Garry Boulard
