NYC Connected Vehicle (V2X) Pilot

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below · 🔎 Last verified 2026-08-06

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

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One of three federal connected-vehicle pilot sites. NYC DOT fitted about 3,000 city fleet vehicles and 12 MTA buses with radios that warned drivers of red-light running, unsafe lane changes and pedestrians, talking to 450 roadside units across three zones in Manhattan and Brooklyn; some 25 handsets gave visually impaired pedestrians crossing help. Licensing the roadside units alone took 18 months. Through 2021 half the fleet ran with alerts on and half stayed silent as a control. In November 2020 the FCC gave most of the 5.9 GHz band to Wi-Fi, and by July 2022 NYC DOT's own filing called its DSRC units dormant.

Completed 📅 2016–2021

Outcome📉 Scaled back

Evidence📊 Independent

Run byNew York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT)

Scale🏘️ District

Cost$25M USDOT award (2016)

FundingUSDOT Connected Vehicle Pilot Deployment Program (federal grant)

📊 Impact

Red Light Violation Warning cut red-light running by 41 percent and Lane Change Warning cut the unsafe lane change rate by 46 percent, measured by USDOT's Volpe Center across the 3,000 equipped vehicles in 2021 against a control group whose alerts stayed silent. A separate independent evaluation for USDOT found little evidence that the deployment changed public agency efficiency at all.

🎓 Lesson

The pilot did the hard part: it produced controlled evidence that the warnings changed how people drove. What it could not control was the spectrum underneath it. A regulator reassigned the band, a $25 million deployment went quiet, and no one ever had to call it a failure — the city has a C-V2X waiver but no confirmed replacement on the street.

🚲 Mobility Safety & security Traffic management Sensors & IoT Connectivity & 5G

Sources

↗ USDOT ITS JPO — Piloting Connected Vehicle Technology in New York City's Dense Urban SettingFederal programme office case study, the deployment-size source. Verbatim: 'In 2016, the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) awarded the New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) $25 million'; '3,000 city fleet vehicles that frequent the deployment areas were outfitted with onboard CV technology, and 450 CV-enabled roadside units (RSUs) were installed'; 'NYCDOT had to undergo an 18-month process to obtain licenses for all 450 units from the Federal Communication Commission (FCC).'

↗ USDOT Volpe Center — Safety Impact Assessment of New York City Connected Vehicle Pilot Safety Applications (FHWA-JPO-22-937, May 2022)The evaluation the impact figures come from, and the reason this entry is graded independent: authors Lam, Chupp, Najm, Brewer and Fallings are all Volpe — USDOT's federal research centre — not NYCDOT, the grantee. Assesses nine safety applications over the naturalistic driving of 3,000 equipped vehicles from January to December 2021, across roughly 160,289 alert events.

↗ USDOT ITS JPO — Connected Vehicle Pilot Deployment Program (2024 Update), executive briefingCarries the impact sentences verbatim and cites them to the Volpe-sourced benefit record 2022-B01691. Also the source for the 12 MTA buses, the roughly 25 personal devices for visually impaired pedestrians, and the three deployment zones in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

↗ USDOT ITS Knowledge Resources — benefit record 2022-B01691Resolves the attribution chain: the record the 41 and 46 percent figures hang on is sourced to the Volpe report FHWA-JPO-22-937, prepared for the Federal Highway Administration.

↗ Texas A&M Transportation Institute for USDOT — Connected Vehicle Pilot Deployment Program Independent Evaluation (17 June 2022)The counterweight, and independent of both NYCDOT and Volpe. On the New York site: 'there is little evidence to support that the deployment had a significant impact on public agency efficiency', attributed to the safety focus and to COVID-19 having altered NYC travel patterns.

↗ NYCDOT, Cambridge Systematics and NYU for USDOT — CV Pilot Phase 3 System Performance Report (FHWA-JPO-18-715, 29 December 2021)Grantee's own final performance report — the source for the experimental design quoted in the snippet: a before period from 1 January to 19 May 2021 with every vehicle silent, and an after period from 1 June to 31 December 2021 in which treatment vehicles issued alerts while control vehicles stayed silent.

↗ USDOT — Recent FCC Public Notices on the 5.9 GHz Safety BandThe load-bearing source for what became of the deployment. Logs NYC DOT's filing of 1 July 2022 seeking to 'deploy C-V2X roadside units to replace the existing but now dormant DSRC' units licensed under call sign WQBH353. The word dormant is the city's own, in a federal filing.

↗ FCC — Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) ServiceRegulator's own page on the band change that stranded the deployment: the November 2020 First Report and Order moved the lower 45 megahertz to unlicensed use and kept only the upper 30 megahertz for intelligent transportation systems.

↗ NYC DOT — NYC Connected Vehicle ProjectCurrency check and the operator's closing statement: 'The NYC Connected Vehicle Project has concluded.' The project's dedicated site cvp.nyc now redirects here.

↗ USDOT ITS Knowledge Resources — benefit record 2022-B01650 (pedestrian crossing app)Why no pedestrian figure appears in the impact field. The 83 percent who felt safer come from the grantee's own report and a study of 24 volunteers with vision disabilities at four intersections — self-reported. The same record notes participants reporting inaccurate location information and slow responses.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇺🇸 Smart Columbus Operating System (Open Data Platform) · Columbus Sibling USDOT grants that both went dark: Columbus's platform to institutional neglect, New York's to a spectrum reallocation. 🇺🇸 Midtown in Motion Adaptive Traffic Control · New York City Same city, same streets, opposite fate: fixed roadside sensing still running since 2011 against in-vehicle radios that stopped. 🇺🇸 Automated school-zone speed cameras (Vision Zero) · New York City Two ways to change driver behaviour in New York: warn the driver in the cab, or mail them a ticket. Only one is still operating.

Explore the wider context

📟 A Reading Is Not a Decision 🛡️ Safety & security guide 🏙️ New York City city profile 🚲 Mobility projects 📖 Automated speed enforcement (speed cameras)📖 Adaptive traffic signals 📖 ANPR (automatic number-plate recognition)

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “NYC Connected Vehicle (V2X) Pilot” — New York City, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/nyc-connected-vehicle-pilot/ (last verified 2026-08-06). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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