Title: Passenger Rail - Integrating Security, Surveillance, and Operational Applications over a Common Communications Infrastructure
Abstract: Every day, public transportation officials face growing economic, environmental, and security challenges. This paper describes how the costs of operating and maintaining modern, efficient public transportation systems are rising. Increasing fuel costs, stricter environmental and pollution regulations, and infrastructure upgrades all place stress on the public transportation industry. If these challenges are not complex enough, recent government-mandated security requirements add to the stress. To address this situation, transit officials are managing a series of facility upgrades to modernize and improve public transportation systems’ conditions and performance. However, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the estimated annual average expenditure to improve conditions and performance in public transportation totals $20.6 billion. Public transit officials must continually strive to find ways to improve operational efficiencies and profitability �” and enhance security �” while minimizing impact to the daily flow of people through the public transit system. Officials are looking to information technology and advanced communications to help meet the challenge. One way to do this is to implement a unified communications infrastructure that is reliable, secure, flexible, and interoperable �” an infrastructure that serves as a foundation for: (1) improving efficiency by reducing delay and congestion; (2) enhancing security as the foundation for next generation electronic security systems; (3) generating incremental revenue; and (4) lowering total cost of ownership, and future proofing the network from the applications.
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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