DEVELOPMENT OF AN INTER-AGENCY TRANSPORTATION DATA PLATFORM TO MITIGATE CONGESTION IN A BI-NATIONAL REGION

This presentation is regarding a Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Advanced Transportation and Congestion Management Technologies Deployment (ATCMTD) grant project. NITTEC and its partners have developed AllRoads, a platform to bring together transportation data from a wide variety of sources to allow for better situational awareness and response to regional traffic events. The project also included the deployment and integration of several Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) field equipment pilots. The system addresses some of the long standing challenges experienced in the Buffalo Niagara Region. While ITS projects have been successfully deployed in the past, integrating them into traffic management operations, especially across agency jurisdictions, has proven difficult. NITTEC leveraged the strong inter-agency collaboration in the region to create a new system which addresses the needs of its member agencies, bringing together the previously siloed sources of traffic data into a common platform. The overall objectives of this project included balancing multi-modal demand across the Niagara Frontier border crossings, improving freight operations by providing targeted information to drivers, using improved weather information in traffic management, expanding integrated corridor management activities, and real-time inter-agency information sharing and collaboration.

AllRoads was developed following the Systems Engineering process and incorporated an updated regional traffic model and decision support system (DSS) to generate predicative traffic management strategies that will improve regional traffic performance. NITTEC also used this project to deploy new sources of transportation data which were then made available to its member agencies through AllRoads. These included: traffic signal connectivity, enhanced border crossing vehicle detection, video analytics, and parking management.

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