CTS News

VDOT Responsibility Changing


BY PETER BACQUE
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Mar 31, 2001 - 12:19 AM

The clock was moving toward midnight and Cecile McCusker's shift at the new Richmond Smart Travel Center was winding down when a tractor-trailer rammed a pickup on Interstate 95 and kept rolling north toward the James River Bridge.

"I'm catching all this on the scanner," the shift supervisor recalled of the Oct. 18 incident.

The rampaging rig went through the bridge's lane-marking orange barrels and crossed the emergency bypass lane, heading northbound in the southbound lanes.

Smart Traffic director Robb Alexander said shift supervisor Cecile McCusker was working the Oct. 18 wreck on I-95 from the start.
The veteran traffic system operator went into action.

"That was a tremendous accident," said the Smart Traffic Center's director, Robb Alexander. "We were on that from the beginning."

Opened in June with the limited goal of helping move traffic smoothly through the James River Bridge reconstruction project, the center went into round-the-clock, seven-day-a-week operation on March 5. Giving drivers critical travel and safety information quickly and helping public safety and highway officials restore traffic at emergency scenes are the center's aim, Alexander said.

Setting up the center in the old Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike building in Chester has cost about $3.5 million so far.

The center's small staff uses video cameras and monitors, computers, highway advisory radio stations, highway variable message signs, yellow incident report cards and the telephone to locate, confirm and help fix problems on central Virginia's interstate highways.

The center's already working an average of one majorincident a shift, as well as handling all calls for VDOT assistance with interstate wrecks or maintenance problems in the 18 localities of the department's Richmond District.

In the past, said Brian Smith, co-director of the University of Virginia Engineering School's Smart Travel Lab, state departments of transportation have been builders and maintainers of roads.

"Now it's shifting to how do we operate a dynamic system so that we get the most out of the huge investment that society's made" in its highway system, Smith said.

Alexander said, "VDOT is changing. It's a different mentality."

The Virginia Department of Transportation is already running smart traffic centers in Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia.

In the past decade, metropolitan traffic has grown by 30 percent resulting in chronic gridlock, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, and in the next decade the number of cars on America's highways will increase by 50 percent. With Americans stuck in traffic 2 billion hours annually, congestion costs more than $48 billion in lost productivity each year.

That's where intelligent transportation systems like the Smart Traffic Center can help.

According to the federal Transportation Department, ITS incident management programs can reduce congestion delays caused by highway incidents from 10 percent to 45 percent, while advanced traffic surveillance and signal control systems have cut delays from 8 percent to 25 percent.

However, Richmond's operation is still only a kind-of-smart traffic center, officials and experts said, as the transportation world feels its way toward truly intelligent transportation systems.

"These guys talk a big game," said one person familiar with VDOT's smart traffic operations. "Throw in a couple of phone lines and a computer, and they think, 'Boy, we are really in it.'"

Alexander agreed: "We have just taken our first step."

Intelligent transportation systems are bundles of separate information technologies, and up to now VDOT has concentrated on systems to gather basic traffic data, explained research scientist Cathy McGhee with the Virginia Transportation Research Council in Charlottesville.

That situation will be changing, she said, toward using the newfound information to make sharp decisions and move traffic - and people - more effectively.

Copyright © 2001 Richmond Newspapers Inc. All rights reserved