DETROIT, MI — Jim Barbaresso, HNTB National Practice Leader ITS and Emerging Mobility Solutions, Senior Vice President and HNTB Fellow, has been elected to the ITS World Congress Hall of Fame as the 2019 Americas winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award. He received the award at the ITS World Congress Hall of Fame ceremony at the 26th ITS World Congress in Singapore.

The ITS World Congress Hall of Fame was created in 2010 to recognize luminaries and true thought leaders in the ITS field. According to the organization, the Hall of Fame Awards provide an invaluable opportunity to highlight the successes of the most outstanding, ambitious and innovative ITS deployments and to reward those people and organizations most worthy of recognition and praise.

As a Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Barbaresso was recognized as a leader in the ITS field and a champion for the vision of ITS and its fulfilment within and beyond the ITS community. He pioneered many ITS solutions during his career, including the landmark FAST-TRAC program, one of the nation’s first and largest ITS operational tests. He also developed numerous mechanisms to integrate safety into daily decisions and operations and created data-driven decision support systems to incorporate safety as the primary criterion for establishing highway project priorities and distributing funding. Barbaresso conducted research that led to changes in operational procedures and policies and the implementation of life-saving projects in his home state of Michigan.

“It is truly an honor to join my respected colleagues in the ITS World Congress Hall of Fame,” Barbaresso said. “Over the past four decades, I have devoted my career to improving safety, mobility and the environment through the application of advanced technology to transportation systems. I am humbled and grateful to see my body of work and contributions to the field be recognized by my peers.”

In his national role with HNTB, Barbaresso is responsible for leading the firm’s efforts to provide ITS and emerging mobility solutions to state departments of transportation, local transportation agencies, transit agencies, airports and toll authorities throughout the United States.

Barbaresso has been actively involved in ITS since the late 1980s, when he first implemented ITS solutions at the Road Commission for Oakland County, Michigan. He has held multiple leadership positions within organizations, including the Traffic Improvement Association of Michigan and the Institute of Transportation Engineers.

Since the first ITS World Congress in Paris in 1994, Barbaresso has demonstrated leadership in ITS America and its state chapters. In 2010, when Detroit was selected to host the 2014 ITS World Congress, he stepped up to chair the ITS World Congress that year and help reinvigorate the city of Detroit and re-establish it as a global player in emerging mobility.

Barbaresso’s thought leadership is regularly sought after by conferences, organizations and media, resulting in more than 200 papers, articles and presentations throughout the world during his career. In 2015 he presented a TedX talk about the future of driverless cars and discussed “Promises and privacy problems of connected cars” at a National Press Club Newsmakers event in Washington, D.C.

He and his team offer insights to a variety of mainstream and trade media outlets on topics including Smart Cities; development of advanced and active traffic management systems; big data; design and operation of transportation, toll and emergency management centers; truck platooning and parking; and the latest advancements in connected and automated transportation technologies.

HNTB has been involved in a number of projects related to connected and automated vehicle initiatives in Michigan, including the Safety Pilot Connected Vehicle Model Deployment in Ann Arbor, Michigan and the American Center for Mobility in Ypsilanti, Michigan.