Title: INTEGRATION OF PUBLIC SAFETY AND TRANSPORTATION FOR COORDINATED INCIDENT MANAGEMENT: NATIONAL STRATEGIES AND REGIONAL PROGRAMS
Abstract: Fiscal constraints placed upon governmental agencies tasked with providing public services are routinely under pressure to improve their efficiency, often with reduction of available resources. The need to streamline operations, while improving service delivery, is readily apparent in the area of incident management and highway operations. Historically, these services are provided by transportation and public safety agencies, whose collaboration has been minimal at best. Their missions, although parallel, rarely have been allowed to intersect, as each discipline maintained parochial attitudes about planning, budgeting, communications and response. Successful integration of services requires philosophical changes at multiple organizational levels within agencies of each discipline. This represents the most significant challenge to realization of the technological and strategic potential for improved services that exist today. Many of these comprehensive organizational changes are stimulated by grassroots efforts at the operational levels of regional agency staff. Transportation agencies have been braced by the skyrocketing costs of building and maintaining roadways which are operating at or above capacity, while highway law enforcement must balance the need to respond to, thoroughly investigate and clear incidents efficiently with a minimal impact to the motoring public. Each of these entities must respect the quality of life issues which result from protracted delay caused by highway incidents, including environmental, economic, and impacts to public health and safety exacerbated by lengthy and often unnecessary closures and delays. Recent federal initiatives, combined with improvements in information technology which allows the public to gather a clearer image of what is occurring on the highway system, has generated a significant interest in the integration of public safety and transportation incident response and congestion mitigation. Several key program areas have been encouraged at a national level, while new transportation and communication technologies have allowed for improved coordination of incident detection, verification, response and clearance. A partnership between State Transportation and State Police agencies in New York's Hudson Valley area has been a leader in the integration of incident management services, and a variety of programs and projects have been initiated as a result of this collaboration. Several of these efforts have achieved national attention, and further opportunities for partnering are being explored.
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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