Regional Integrated Transportation Information System

The Regional Integrated Transportation Information System (RITIS) was conceptualized in 2001 by the TPB's Management, Operations, and Intelligent Transportation Systems (MOITS) Technical Task Force (now the MOITS Technical Subcommittee), and has been developed on behalf of the region by the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Transportation Technology.

Numerous agencies operate portions of the region's transportation systems. In turn, these agencies utilize numerous separate computerized systems that detect traffic, measure speed on given roadway links, hold reports of crashes or other incidents, project when the next transit bus will arrive at a stop, and a host of other data. Historically, these data had not been amalgamated regionally. But now RITIS acts as a "data fusion engine" that puts together transportation systems condition information from these disparate sources, and makes it available back to the region's stakeholders in the systems and software they already use for their internal purposes.

Transportation personnel and the general public may never see or perceive the existence of RITIS; however, information they may have in their software system, see on a Web site, or hear in a radio traffic report, may have been gathered, cross-compared, error-checked, and filtered by RITIS. RITIS also provides critical real-time information to the Metropolitan Area Transportation Operations Coordination (MATOC) Program. Improved real-time information is a keystone for effective management of the region's transportation system and the numerous incidents that occur upon it everyday.