Metropolitan Area Transportation Operations Coordination Program

A truck overturns on the Beltway. A building fire closes a major roadway. Service to a transit station is interrupted due to police activity. Such events occur frequently in the Washington region. The immediate scenes of these incidents are handled with skill by responsible police, fire, transportation, and other responder personnel. Following well-established incident command procedures, they work to clear the problem as quickly as possible while protecting safety and security. These occurrences, however, also can have impacts on the transportation system far from the incident scene, generating major traffic tie-ups or transit delays. On-scene responders often are too busy to spend significant time addressing these faraway secondary "ripple effects" affecting thousands of people. Historically, the region has addressed such ripple effects on a case-by-case basis without a single, designated regionwide entity responsible for coordination.

Following the experiences of the 9/11 attacks and other major incidents, TPB championed creation of the Metropolitan Area Transportation Operations Coordination (MATOC) Program, partnering with the region's major transportation agencies - the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia Departments of Transportation, and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. At the initiative of U.S. Congressman Jim Moran, a $1.6 million grant to jumpstart the MATOC Program was provided in the 2005 SAFETEA-LU federal transportation reauthorization legislation, enabling the region's transportation agencies with TPB to initiate the program.

"We need to coordinate construction schedules. We need to coordinate the way we address traffic incidents. And we certainly need to communicate better so that we can immediately figure out the most efficient way to deal with transportation crises as they arise," Congressman Moran told the TPB in April 2005.

MATOC Program development was also advised by experts at the U.S. Department of Transportation's Volpe Center research arm. Volpe indicated that the establishment of such a program would benefit incident management work each transportation agency already does. The Center's researchers confirmed that there are capability shortfalls if there is no designated accountability for undertaking regional coordination activities. Volpe noted that the program does not have to be a bricks-and-mortar center, but it must be a committed cooperative effort among key agencies. Accomplishing MATOC Program goals will rely to the greatest extent possible on existing agency personnel and effective implementation of technology.

Goals for the MATOC Program include:

  • Based upon improved standard operating procedures and notification practices, strengthen multi-agency coordination among transportation response agencies during incidents.
  • Improve the technological systems by which transportation agencies can share data with each other to aid incident management.
  • Improve the quality and timeliness of the information available through current sources (e.g., radio and television stations) on transportation systems conditions, especially during incidents.
  • Coordinate with the University of Maryland on the separate but related Regional Integrated Transportation Information System (RITIS). RITIS is to provide real-time transportation data compiled from each of the region's transportation agencies, and will be the primary source of information used within the MATOC Program. Traveler information compiled by RITIS is available through the MATOC website.
  • Help ensure transportation systems condition information is provided to emergency management and public safety agencies to aid in their responses to declared emergencies or major disasters. In such incidents, transportation emergency management becomes one of a number of support functions to public safety agency leadership of the response.

MATOC Steering Committee and Facilitator: To further the regional coordination commitment, Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia and WMATA have collaboratively established the MATOC Steering Committee. The Steering Committee is the governing body of the MATOC Program and works through subcommittees specializing in operations and systems issues. The Steering Committee, through COG and TPB, has engaged the services of a "MATOC Facilitator". The MATOC Facilitator acts as a “communications hub,” ensuring that accurate and timely information on transportation incidents of a regional significance is shared among operations agencies and with the public. In addition to these responsibilities, the Facilitator leads, coordinates, and participates in the development of operating procedures, communications protocols, news system functionality, regional incident management plans, post-incident reviews, and training.

Schedule: The MATOC Program is under operations, hosted by the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Transportation Technology, and collocated with the University's Capital Wireless Information Net (CapWIN) Program in Greenbelt, Maryland. The latest information on the MATOC Program is available on the MATOC website.