Integrating Computer-Aided Dispatch Data with Traffic Management Centers

Chapter 1. Introduction

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) defines Traffic Incident Management (TIM) as the coordinated detection, response, and clearance of roadway incidents in a way that is safe for motorists and responders. Proper TIM limits exposure (risk) of those entities responding to roadway incidents, reduces the potential for secondary crashes, and helps to facilitate effective incident clearance to mitigate congestion.

The FHWA has placed significant emphasis on TIM to improve safety for responders, promote increased collaboration among incident responders, provide multi-agency training, and support States and regions in elevating the focus on TIM performance analysis. In addition to improving responder processes and multi-discipline coordination during incident response, one of the most effective TIM strategies is the improved and enhanced situational awareness gained through sharing real-time incident data and incident information. Public safety agencies, like law enforcement, use Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) systems to catalog and coordinate activities. This makes CAD one of the richest sources of real-time incident information, since most road incidents are initially detected through 9-1-1 calls. This CAD information supports incident detection, notification, and response activities of critical public safety and emergency responders.

Sharing real-time CAD incident data has yielded quantifiable benefits, demonstrated by the following findings throughout the United States:

• After implementing integrated data sharing and coordination procedures between the Oregon State Police and the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT), there was a 30 percent reduction in incident response time and a 38 percent reduction in incident duration.
• In Minnesota, more than 70 percent of events to which Minnesota Department of Transportation (DOT) responded come through their integrated CAD data sharing with the State Police. The Minnesota DOT is able to mobilize and respond faster to incidents and support responder personnel on scene.
• In Florida, 42 percent of incident notifications in the State DOT’s traffic management system originate from the Florida Highway Patrol (FHP) CAD system.
• Florida’s success is evidenced in the fact that approximately 42 percent of the more than 91,000 annual traffic crashes in the Florida

Real-time incident data has key benefits for several entities involved in incident response:

• For law enforcement, fire and other responders, the availability of real-time data from more reliable sources can help to accelerate overall incident response and clearance activities, which ultimately reduces the amount of time responders are on-scene and exposed to risks.
• Reducing the time to respond to and clear incidents also reduces the potential for secondary crashes. The potential for a secondary crash increases by 2.8 percent for each minute the primary incident continues to be a hazard. Extended time to respond to an incident poses a significant potential risk to responders and other travelers.¹
• Transportation operations and management agencies benefit from an increased awareness of incidents, their location, and severity. Better information provided by law enforcement helps to inform transportation agencies of response resource needs for traffic management and scene clearance.
• Timely incident notifications are a critical part of traveler information systems, which help to alert travelers to an incident or closure on their route.

In addition to documented benefits during incident detection, notification, and response, CAD data provides agencies with accurate and more complete data to support TIM performance measures and performance analysis. This data set and the resulting performance measures can help to better inform resource needs and allocation, identify critical TIM gaps, and provide important justifications for future TIM investments. TIM data helps to educate agency leadership and can convey positive results of State and local TIM investments.

Integrated Public Safety-Transportation Agency Data

There are many benefits to integrating public safety CAD data with transportation agency operating systems like Traffic Management Centers (TMC). More than half of State DOTs have indicated that they have some form of access to real-time public safety CAD data. This data access ranges from manual incident notifications between public safety agency dispatch centers and TMC operators, to view only access of filtered CAD data feeds to fully integrated CAD and TMC data exchanges.

Over the last 15 years, there have been several efforts focused on improving real-time data sharing between CAD systems and TMC traffic management systems. Experiences in States such as Minnesota, Maryland, Washington, Oregon, and Florida provide valuable lessons learned and have helped to pave the way for showing how States can address both the technical and institutional needs for sharing real-time CAD. There are also examples of implementations of CAD data sharing at the local level. One example is from Phoenix, Arizona, where local fire and police agencies are sharing filtered CAD data with a regional data system, which then disseminates this information to media, traveler information systems, and transportation agencies. Although the Arizona Department of Public Safety shared data with the State’s Traffic Operations Center (TOC), there was a gap for arterial incident information; this was addressed through data sharing agreements and data interfaces with Phoenix and Mesa Fire agencies. In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee County Sheriff shares CAD data with the Wisconsin DOT Statewide TOC through a data sharing portal.

While there have been some major success stories in CAD-TMC data sharing and data integration, having full integration between these systems is not a common practice among States, and is therefore worthy of review.

Primer Objectives

The FHWA has placed a significant focus on helping States better utilize data to tell a more complete story of how TIM programs are helping to save responder lives, time, and money. Recognizing that strong performance data is the key to a successful business case for integrating CAD data with transportation operations, this document has been developed to highlight:

• Specific benefits that sharing CAD data can provide to support a more robust TIM strategy.
• Benefits for both law enforcement and transportation operations as a result of sharing real-time CAD data.
• Successful practices of early adopters of CAD-TMC integration, including State and local agency examples.
• Strategies for improving program business cases through more complete and quantitative performance data.
• Methods for overcoming institutional and technical challenges to facilitate system-to-system CAD data exchanges.
• Strategies and resources that are available to advance CAD integration.