Teams, Technology, and Transportation…Saving you Time; Saving Lives
Posted by Dave Fowler on Tue, Nov 18, 2008 @ 10:50 AM
Last week the City of NY opened up the largest and one of the most sophisticated Transportation Command Centers in North America, the
Joint Transportation Mangement Center (JTMC). As interesting as the technology is, what makes this fusion center (combining video monitoring, dispatch center and emergency operations) exciting and effective is the integration of three organizations (NYC DOT, NY State DOT, and NYC Police) in one room sharing the same information and physical security assets, not only to do their own jobs but also to immediately team up to solve cross agency situations before they become nasty.
When a problem occurs in a loaded transportation system in a large city, time is the enemy. For every one minute the situation goes unresolved it takes ten minutes to clean up. Unresolved situations cost time, money and lives. The new PSIM technology deployed in this command center allows all the agencies to share the 500 cameras around the city, share the information coming from road sensors, identify impending problems, coordinate activities to redirect traffic around the president's caravan, and respond to accidents with the right resources (ambulance, police, fire, hazmat team). What other organizations have you seen with this integration?
Technology alone is not the answer. Multi-agency teamwork alone is not the answer. The future lies in the integration of the two. They will be showing off that vision of the future with tours for the JTMC at this week's Intelligent Transportation System World Conference. For those of you that can't make it you can get a peek through the following link. View the video...see the future.
Let us know what you think...