Traffic Management Centers

Each municipality in the Los Angeles area has a system for controlling its traffic intersections, or allows another regional authority to do so for them. As the circuitry in the control boxes at intersections gets connected to hubs on a network, these systems become controllable from a central point, and can add their data to the big picture of the regional traffic system. Small local city control centers can be as simple as a networked computer workstation. However the larger systems have a Traffic Management Center (TMC), characterized by rows of workstations facing a video wall. There are around a dozen TMCs in the region, operated by cities like Beverly Hills and Pasadena, transportation agencies such as the MTA and LAX, and regional authorities such as Orange County. In Los Angeles, two major TMCs monitor and control the traffic: the City’s ATSAC for streets, and Caltrans’ TMC for highways.

ATSAC
Four levels under City Hall, next to the Emergency Operations Center for the city government, the City Department of Transportation’s Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control Center, ATSAC, was created to manage traffic around the Coliseum during the 1984 Olympics. It has evolved into the centralized control point for the city’s traffic management systems, run by 20 or so engineers, which develop new and innovative software that they apply to their task.

Caltrans TMC
A few blocks from ATSAC, at the California Department of Transportation building at 120 South Spring Street, Caltrans District 7, which manages the highways in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, has their Traffic Management Center. About 20 people work inside it, including dispatchers for freeway service patrols, signal management personnel, highway maintenance, and a few uniformed California Highway Patrol officers, serving primarily as liaisons to the media. Within a year or two this TMC, and the rest of the art deco building that houses the District 7 headquarters, will be torn down, as the new Caltrans headquarters a block away is nearing completion. A new 88,000 square foot TMC will be collocated with the CHP’s Los Angeles Communications Center, at another new facility, called the Los Angeles Regional Transportation Management Center, which will be mounted on earthquake shock-absorbing springs, and is under construction in Glendale. The current CHP Los Angeles Communications Center, where among other things all 911 calls made from cell phones in the region are received, is in a highly secure building on Rosewood Boulevard, near Vermont and the 101 Freeway.

Los Angeles County TMC
The county of Los Angeles is building a traffic management center at the County Department of Public Works headquarters in Alhambra. The 9,000 square foot TMC will be located in an existing annex building on the property, and should open by 2005. It will contain fifteen consoles as well as the requisite video wall, with sixteen 50 inch monitors. The County is responsible for around 2,000 of the 10,000 intersections in Los Angeles County, including around 800 that are in unincorporated county areas. They are currently preparing to connect 750 of these intersections to the new TMC.