Transportation agencies in Georgia, North Carolina, Texas and Washington State have been announced as winners of the 2nd Annual Transportation Systems Management and Operations (TSMO) Awards organised by the USA’s National Operations Centre of Excellence (NOCoE).
Created through a partnership between the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) and ITS America, with support from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the mission of the NOCoE is to empower the TSMO community to succeed by building its knowledge, skills and abilities. Launched last year, the Centre’s awards celebrate the expanding discipline of TSMO, which aims to get the most out of the country’s existing transportation system by managing and operating networks in an efficient manner that emphasizes safety and mobility while empowering the workforce to operate the system.
The TSMO Awards were open to cities, counties, MPOs (RPO, COG), state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) and private sector organizations, with the NOCoE receiving 46 entries for their second year. The NOCoE notes that each entry showed creativity and highlighted the fantastic transportation management and operations work going on around the country. The number and quality of this year’s submissions addressed everything from running the Super Bowl to the management of big data, and also the preparation for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). Winners in each of the four categories highlighted a successful TSMO project undertaken in the last five years that provided a clear benefit to the traveling public through initiatives that save lives, time and money.
At the 2020 AASHTO Spring Meeting on May 26-29 in Kansas City, Missouri, an overall winner will be selected from the four category winners and be presented with the NOCoE TSMO Award Trophy. Also, one individual will be honoured with the annual TSMO Champion Award, who will be selected by the judges for advancing TSMO and changing the way people and organisations think about transportation.
The winners and runners up of the second NOCoE TSMO Awards are:
Agency Improvement – Use of Capability Maturity Model (CMM)
- Winner: North Carolina DOT for its Statewide Central Signal System Initiative;
- Runner-up: Georgia DOT for Georgia’s TSMO Maturity Drives a Safer and More Reliable Commute;
Best TSMO Project
- Winner: Houston TranStar for its Roadway Flood Warning System;
- Runner-up: Arizona DOT for the SR-51 Adaptive Ramp Metering project;
Best Use of Management of Data to Improve TSMO
- Winner: Georgia DOT for an entry on Improving TSMO in Georgia Using Data;
- Runner-up: City of Bellevue in Washington State, for an entry on Development of Bellevue Integration Map for Incident Management;
TSMO Workforce Development
- Winner: Washington State DOT for its TSMO Workforce Development Program;
- Runner-up: Maryland DOT for the SHA Organizational Modernization to Advance TSMO program.
“After the initial excitement around last year’s inaugural awards, the TSMO industry has once again demonstrated the continued ability to capture their best work to share with the broader industry,” said, Patrick Son, NOCoE’s managing director. “Our two new categories, focused on data management and workforce development, just demonstrated how adept the TSMO industry is at using emerging strategies and issues to immediately improve the transportation system. Over the coming months, we will develop each of these fantastic submissions into case studies to continue our mission to transfer knowledge about TSMO throughout the industry.”
