Homeland security and the built environment, part 5

Travel insurance: The training wheels are coming off the latest intelligent transportation systems technologies.

March 11, 2004, might have been just an ordinary Wednesday if automated fare-collection machines equipped with explosive-detection devices had been installed on the Cercanías commuter train system in Madrid. But such ticket vending machines didn't yet exist. and 192 people died and 2,050 were wounded that morning in a series of caoordinated bombings against the train system.

Machines like that do exist today, however, as just one example of the intelligent transportation systems now beginning to appear. Case in point, the first real-world operational test of the Early Warning Explosives Detection System embedded in an automatic public transit ticket vending machine was completed successfully in July.

The prototype machine, the product of a partnership between ge Security and Cubic Corp., was deployed in a Baltimore subway station in June to test whether the system could identify the presence of explosives compounds on passengers' fingers as they purchased tickets prior to passing through the fare-gates to board trains. It can.

Once explosive residue is detected, ticketing is denied and the system gives security a wireless heads-up so they can react quickly.

The system, which incorporates GE's innovative fingertip trace detection analyzer (the Itemiser fx) in Cubic's automatic fare-collection system, is the first product in the team's joint vision for the future of public transit security solutions incorporating a range of automatic fare-collection "touch points."

The system was developed specifically for public transit, as opposed to adapting a system that was never intended for use in that arena.

"It's important that transit agencies provide the highest degree of security in a manner that does not increase operational expenses substantially nor impede passenger flow," says Walt Bonneau, senior vice president and general manager of transportation systems for Cubic (www.cubic.com).

In this sense, rail system security is way ahead of aviation, where passenger inconvenience apparently isn't a consideration. Aviation, however, may be helped by work at the University at Buffalo, where researchers are developing a biometric sensor that could detect traces of explosives on the fingers of airline passengers.

While the results of the Baltimore light rail test have not been formalized, several transit agencies kept an eye on the projects, indicating broad interest.

Spotty coverage on the ground
It's a start for light rail systems, which to this point have been one part of the transportation infrastructure that hasn't received much security attention. More than 2,000 train stations don't even have security cameras, according to the American Public Transit Association.

An apta survey showed that, as recently as last year, 53,000 buses and over 15,000 commuter and subway rail cars also don't have security cameras, and that fewer than half of all buses have automatic vehicle locator systems that allow dispatchers to know where a bus is when an emergency occurs.

Further, no transit system has a permanent bioagent detection system, and only a few are testing chemical-detection solutions. Yet the Bush administration has allocated only a fraction of a transit security need estimated as in excess of $6 billion.

"We're disappointed," apta president William W. Millar told the Senate Subcommittee on Homeland Security in March. The proposed 2007 dhs budget earmarks only $600 million for the Targeted Infrastructure Protection Program — and that's for transit, seaports, railways and other facilities all put together.

In contrast, the Department of Defense budget is over half a trillion dollars, 40% higher than in 2001. One transportation security improvement at the Pentagon is a dedicated access lane to the Remote Delivery Facility, a $10 million project to increase truck queuing capacity that also involved modification of the Arlington County Route 27 and Route 244 interchange.

The RDF is a new 250,000-sq.-ft. shipping and receiving facility adjoining the Pentagon that provides a consolidated location to receive the thousands of items shipped to the Pentagon each day. The Pentagon's close proximity to I-395, Route 27 and Route 110 created the need for an alternative to increase access and boost security. A number of its security innovations were included in the project, although the prime contractor, Earth Tech, is not at liberty to divulge details.

Roads scholars
Intelligent transportation systems is the term used to describe advanced technologies that provide real-time information to traffic managers and emergency operations centers about events that are important to the safety of the infrastructure and its users.

"Today we are seeing technology help monitor everything from the New York City subway to traffic conditions," says John Falcocchio, director of the Urban its Center at Polytechnic University in New York City (http://media.poly.edu/tri/itsdocs/Home.htm).

He says its technologies provide an effective means to observe unusual conditions. "Monitoring technologies allow us to study normal conditions so we're alert when unusual or emergency circumstances come into play."

The roots of its reach from the growing awareness of the effects that weather and emergency events have on traffic operations. Technologies used by its vary from basic traffic-management systems such as in-car GPS navigation, EZ-Pass readers, highway advisory radio, and variable-message signs, to more advanced monitoring applications. Advanced systems include closed-circuit tv cameras and remote sensor applications that monitor weather in real time and de-ice bridges when necessary.

While there is an encouraging amount of information being obtained by its technologies, it doesn't always find its way into the hands of emergency managers.

"In many cases its systems have been deployed, but the emergency management community either hasn't recognized that they're in place or was not included in the planning process," says Bruce Churchill, senior project manager for the Emergency and Transportation Operations Division, Delcan, an international transportation firm <www.delcan.com>.

A failure to communicate
During the 2003 San Diego firestorm, for instance, five emergency operation centers (San Diego County, San Diego Sheriff's Department, San Diego City, San Diego Police Department and San Diego Fire Department) were activated, yet they generally lacked information concerning transportation resources, says Churchill.

Traffic information was down the street, at the regional Transportation Management Center jointly operated by the California Department of Transportation and the California Highway Patrol. The center has several systems that would be valuable in managing incidents of the Cedar Fire's magnitude, including the chp dispatch system, which was used heavily to publish road closures on the chp Web site, and the Caltrans Advanced Transportation Management System, which provides real-time data about traffic flows on all regional freeways.

The center also receives cctv video imagery and controls Changeable Message Signs that warn motorists of major events affecting freeway or arterial travel times.
But none of the eocs that stood up during the fire had access to any of the TMC traffic data.

"There wasn't an understanding in the eocs of the traffic systems available for getting the word out on road closures and freeway conditions during the evacuations," Churchill says. "Adequate civilian evacuation warning systems were non-existent."

Most Cedar Fire evacuations were initiated by sheriff's deputies acting on their own initiative. The San Diego County Emergency Alert System was not activated due to lack of evacuation route information, Churchill says.

Churchill believes this can be cured if the transportation people reach out more to the emergency management. "We need to make sure transportation systems are taken into account in emergency planning."

The failure works both ways, however. Emergency management frequently neglects to include the transportation representatives in their planning process, he says.

Ahead of the curve
A few jurisdictions are already ahead of the curve when it comes to sharing data with emergency response agencies. The North Central Texas Council of Governments, for instance, is leveraging its existing its infrastructure to make all traffic information available to emergency responders.

NCTCOG is investigating how to incorporate the area's Regional Data and Video Communication System and the Center-to-Center Communication software to create a new Emergency Responders Uniform Communication System.

Currently, both rdvcs and c2c are designed only to connect traffic-management centers to each other. rdvcs is the means by which traffic-related data and video are exchanged, and c2c is set up to facilitate communications between the state, transit agencies and local traffic operations centers. c2c inter­connects several traffic management systems and provides a common repository for traffic information in the Dallas–Fort Worth region.

"Interagency awareness amongst emergency responders reporting to major incidents on regional freeways is a key aspect to improving the safety and security of the system," says Sonya L. Jackson, a nctcog senior transportation planner.

While radio interoperability does allow emergency responders to communicate verbally, it doesn't address the exchange of vital data that can only be achieved visually. Jackson says the deployment of erucs will enable the various emergency and homeland security agencies to access video data that's currently unavailable to them.

"Having this data beforehand is important when managing freeway incidents or emergency evacuations," she says.

Jackson says the project will use existing Internet Protocol networks and encrypted wireless technology to send and receive video, photos and data across platforms.

"erucs allows eocs or regional homeland security centers access to transportation data so they can gather intelligence and gauge the need for state or federal resources," Jackson says.
Another transportation entity that isn't hoarding data is the Virginia Department of Transportation's 10-year-old Transportation Emergency Operations Center.

"We have five regional smart traffic centers that lets us deal with transportation on a statewide level," says Perry Cogburn, the teoc's director. "We can move resources around the state where they are needed, and we coordinate activities and share information with the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, Virginia State Police, fbi and Coast Guard."

Types of data the teoc passes on to emergency managers include information about abandoned packages and suspicious activity obtained by cctv cameras positioned throughout the state.

"The Commonwealth has critical infrastructure elements like bridges and tunnels, as well as major military assets," Cogburn says. "Our role is that if we notice something suspicious, we pass it on."

On the road again
The Federal Highway Administration has tried to encourage the integration of data among agencies by promoting the concept of Transportation Management Centers. Earlier this year, the fhwa issued a report titled "Integration of Emergency and Weather Elements into Transportation Management Centers" <www.itsdocs.fhwa.dot.gov/jpodocs/repts_te/14247_files/14247.pdf>.

The report explores how TMCs addressed implementation and challenges pertaining to data integration. Some of the most advanced TMCs have begun to use a blend of weather and emergency information, including transportation, police, fire and other emergency services data, but the majority have made relatively little progress in this direction.

The report says there is low awareness in many TMCs of the opportunities and approaches available for better integration of weather and emergency information. Also, that the importance of identifying champions committed to promote integration can't be overstated.

Still, there are few cross-agency integration guidelines or standards and no national-level TMC-focused stakeholder group to provide support and guidance regarding how integration can benefit transportation operations. There is also no organizational mechanism in place to facilitate communications among TMCs, weather service providers and emergency managers.

Down the road
Nevertheless, new its technologies continue to emerge, and these increasingly intelligent systems are providing richer information to travelers and transportation authorities alike.

And as cars themselves become more intelligent, the more useful they become to transportation officials, who increasingly rely on data gathered by vehicles. More and more of today's cars know where they are, what the temperature is and what the road conditions are, which lets them act as probes for the information systems coming online.

Cellular geolocation, or cell probing, is one controversial technology being used experimentally that may play an eventual role in emergency traffic management. It's a means by which cell phones in automobiles are tracked from cell tower to cell tower in order to extrapolate traffic conditions.

Cellular geolocation has been tested only once through an operational test called capital (for cellular applied to its tracking and location) in the Washington, D.C., area. This methodology supposedly discreetly tracks cellular telephone calls to collect travel time data and monitor freeway conditions.

The idea makes privacy advocates bristle. Proponents of the idea, however, claim that the privacy issue is a red herring, that cellular tracking is completely anonymous, because data is statistically aggregated, which destroys all individual identification.

"Even though we can tell what highway speeds are based on a sample size of hundreds or thousands of cars passing through a cell area over a period of time, there is no way of picking out individual cars to know that Joe Blow was here at a certain time," Churchill says. "We don't have the capability to do that."

Civil libertarians speculate that this only means we don't have the capability to do that yet, which is what causes their concern.

Other than the privacy outcry, another constraint to cellular probing is the limited number of cell users and cell towers, though both continue to grow.

"Technologically, cell probing provides much greater coverage of traffic conditions than what we typically get from roadway sensors," Churchill says.

Caltrans, he says, has sensors embedded on all Southern California freeways that yield a good picture of freeway conditions, but arterial coverage is rare. "Major arteries play a big role in evacuation planning, but we have little visibility there."

Software with serendipity
Experts believe that once cell probe technology gets deployed more ubiquitously around more metropolitan areas, not only will transportation managers have a better handle on traffic on all classifications of roadways, but eocs will have access to the same data for evacuation planning and execution.

Sometimes new its technologies appear serendipitously. Researchers at the University at Buffalo's Center for Computational Research developed a interactive, real-time visualization of what activity on Main Street in downtown Buffalo would be like if vehicular traffic were to be allowed to return after an absence of more than 20 years. Cars were banned from about 11 blocks of Main Street with the creation of a light rail system and pedestrian mall in the 1980s.

The ub developers took standard traffic simulation packages such as Coresim, Syncro and Traf-Netsim, none of which offer much in the way of visualization, and imported a 3-D model, so in real time they can get a bird's- or driver's-eye view of how traffic is affected under different conditions.

The visualizations are so dramatic that the developers were asked if the system could be used for homeland security and disaster response. The answer is probably.

"Visualization is a great way to see what happens during an emergency if a certain road or bridge is no longer available," says Thomas R. Furlani, director of the CCR. "It would be an asset to a command center where they were streaming in all this sensor and probe data and at the same time have a simulation available, so they could go through different scenarios to see what traffic would actually be like if this bridge was out or that tunnel flooded."