The State of Texas has a number of Traffic Management Centers (TMCs) either deployed or in the final stages of development. These include three of the top ten largest metropolitan areas in the United States: Dallas/Fort Worth (DalTrans and TransVISION), Houston (TranStar), and San Antonio (TransGuide). Other metropolitan areas in Texas are in the process of deploying TMCs: Austin, Amarillo, El Paso, Laredo and Pharr. The last three cities mentioned also handle a significant amount of truck traffic, which has increased due to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The TMCs listed above have been developed using variants of at least four distinctly different system architectures. In 1999, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), along with the United States Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), initiated a program to develop a center-to-center (C2C) communications project that would utilize ITS National Standards to allow traffic conditions information to be gathered and displayed. Additionally, the C2C project implemented the infrastructure necessary, again using standards, to provide the capability to perform device command and control from dissimilar TMCs. For the covering abstract see ITRD E114174.
Abstract