Texas Platform Will Assess Dallas-Fort Worth Traffic Data

Transportation data collected across the northern Texas metro regions will be brought into a central integrated platform for improved analysis and mobility management.

The North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) will partner with Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) to develop a transportation technology platform that will consolidate and integrate movement data — and adjacent data that can affect movement — into a central location for analysis and action.

“Really the goal behind it is to bring in data from multiple data sets, to allow us to develop more of an integrated platform of data,” Natalie Bettger, NCTCOG senior program manager, said. The project, she said, will allow the NCTCOG to identify “congestion as well as possible problems that might be causing the congestion, or safety, or other types of things on the transportation system.”

For example, speed data could be used to identify when speeds drop, “and then as we integrate other data sources with that speed data, for example, you could look at crashes, you could look at data from debris on roadways, you could look at information about maintenance of the roadway itself,” Bettger said.

The NCTCOG serves 8.5 million residents across the sprawling Dallas-Fort Worth area. That number is expected to grow to 12 million by 2050, according to officials. Which is why the Council of Governments and SwRI teamed up to develop the Transportation System Management and Operations (TSMO) data exchange solution to enable the easy integration, analysis and sharing of data across the many partners, which can include transit providers and other municipal or county transportation departments, the Texas Department of Transportation, North Texas Tollway Authority and others.

“Our goal is to bring our partner agencies in, use the data, have data available to share with us, and allow them to be part of the process, to help us prioritize data sets for the region, and use cases,” Bettger said.

The Southwest Research Institute, a nonprofit applied research organization, will be involved in the software development, and will build a tool similar to the technology product developed for the state of Florida, which was a data exchange platform the state used for connected vehicle data, said Kevin Miller, a staff engineer leading the initiative for SwRI’s Intelligent Systems Division.

“We integrate to a lot of different traffic management-type systems,” Miller said, pointing to data from various state, tolling, traffic management systems, traffic signals and third-party data sources such as the National Weather Service.

“To me, this is a building process. We deploy the platform. People start using it,” he said. “It’s a very iterative process.”

“This model fosters innovation and cost savings when agencies in various states share knowledge and features across our software ecosystem,” Josh Johnson, director of SwRI’s Intelligent Transportation Systems Department, said in a statement.

Soon, Bettger said, SwRI will begin working on a “concept of operations” and an implementation plan, which is expected to be complete in the spring of 2026.

This story originally appeared in Government Technology, Industry Insider — Texas' sister publication.