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With over 30,000 lives lost each year due to vehicle crashes, the US Department of Transportation views safety as its highest priority. The Department, working in concert with industry, has embarked on an ambitious effort to establish vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications as a capability for potentially saving thousands of lives each year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has stated that in 2013 it intends to make a major decision on whether to pursue regulation of Vehicle Communications for Safety for light vehicles and a similar decision in 2014 for heavy vehicles. Current research in the V2V and Safety Pilot programs are focused towards supporting these decision points by determining how effective the systems are and therefore, the magnitude of the safety benefits associated with connected vehicle technology.

The U.S. Department of Transportation's ITS Joint Program Office is supporting an extensive, multi-year program of accelerated standards development to facilitate the successful national deployment of Intelligent Transportation Systems The program is supporting and accelerating the existing ITS consensus-based volunteer standards processes already underway in the U.S.. This paper explains the background and goals of the program and reports on progress to date. The standards chosen for the JPO program include both infrastructure standards and vehicle standards, although the focus is on infrastructure standards which support public sector needs. It is intended that the more rapid development of ITS standards through this program will help accelerate the deployment of ITS on a nationwide basis, thus providing the benefits of safer, more efficient, nationally integrated advanced transportation as early as possible.