Washington’s transportation leaders are preparing to unveil a system that would give Virginia, the District of Columbia, Maryland and Metro unprecedented access to each other’s traffic and transit information, revolutionizing how the region communicates and responds to major disruptions.
“Almost every week we have new reminders that the region needs a more coordinated transportation response and public communication capability,” said David Snyder, vice chairman of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments Transportation Planning Board, which is developing the new system.
Officials said they hoped to have the program running in some form by December and in full form by July 2009.
Commuters have been foiled by several incidents in the last month alone, including a Metro derailment, severe weather that splayed trees and power lines across major roadways and a massive downtown power outage that shut down traffic signals in the city’s busiest hub.
While the state and local jurisdictions have strong informal working relationships, they have no standard procedure for communicating about such incidents and no centralized place for commuters to access up-to-the-minute, regional information.
“The local agency tends to be very focused on working with the local police to get the situation resolved, but they don’t say, ‘Geez, maybe we ought to be diverting traffic — what do we need to do, who do we have to call so that folks can make better decisions?’ ” said Richard Steeg, a Virginia Department of Transportation operations administrator and chairman of the COG committee.
Since 2006, COG has been working with representatives from the Maryland State Highway Administration, the Maryland, Virginia and D.C. departments of transportation and Metro to establish an independent group that would oversee transportation communication among the jurisdictions.
The program centers on a database, developed by the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Transportation Technology in 2002, that is able to automatically collect and display the information that the transportation agencies enter into their respective systems.
Maryland, Virginia, D.C. and Metro’s Operations Control Center now all have the required software, and Virginia and Maryland already are using the system to share information.
The agencies have yet to determine whether the database would be available for public viewing, but officials said it seemed likely.
“It makes sense if you think about it,” Steeg said. “Anybody at anytime ought to be able to go to [the program] Web site and see what’s going on in the region.”
