Traffic Incident Management
Various traffic incident management scenes - heavy traffic after accident, traffic planning, police car blocking road, overturned car on bridge, detour, rescue workers.
Office of Operations 21st Century Operations using 21st Century Technologies

Computer-Aided Dispatch – Traffic Management Center Data Integration and Communication

Supporting Technologies > Integrated Communications/ ITS > Computer-Aided Dispatch – Traffic Management Center Data Integration and Communication

Most traffic incidents are first detected by means of a cellular telephone call that is received at a Public Safety Answering Point. The information is then routed to the appropriate public safety dispatcher (law enforcement, fire-rescue, medical) for response, but may not go to a transportation management center (TMC). Often TMCs find out about the incident through their own devices, usually several minutes later.

The TMCs have traffic and transportation related information that would be important to public safety responders both to enable quicker response and also to manage the incident scene more effectively. That information may not get to public safety agencies. Towing and recovery companies can be left out of the loop entirely except for voice communications with law enforcement.

There is strong interest and some progress being made in data integration between TMC databases and public safety CAD databases, working through the data security issues to provide true two-way data communication among public safety and transportation agencies.

Integrated CAD-TMC Field Operational Test

This field operational test provided for the creation of teams in two states - Utah and Washington - to provide integration of data among transportation management and public safety CAD system databases to make rapid exchange of unambiguous incident-related information possible. This data integration will facilitates quicker and more appropriate response by secondary responders and provide better traffic and incident-related information to public safety agencies. The teams in both States consisted of a transportation agency and its systems integrator and a public safety agencies and its CAD vendor.

CAD-ITS Integration User Group

This new user group was formed and met for the fist time in December 2003. The user group is composed of transportation and public safety practitioners who are engaged in integrating public safety CAD systems and transportation management systems to allow the two-way sharing of data among these disparate systems. The function of the user group is two-fold. First, it provides a forum for those at various stages of integrating or linking CAD and ITS with the opportunity to discuss technical, institutional, and operational issues that they have encountered in implementing their respective systems. Second, it provides the opportunity for public safety and transportation officials to exchange ideas within the group to maximize the potential for success in their respective projects.

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