TRANSMIT—A Real Time Travel Time Information System in New York Metropolitan Area

The TRANSMIT system is a regional traffic monitoring system that uses RFID tag readers to read E-ZPass tags at strategic locations throughout New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The readers installed along or over a roadway section are used to identify vehicles equipped with E-ZPass tags provided by multi-agencies through E-ZPass Regional Customer Service Center. These vehicle tags are detected by an upstream reader and re-detected by a downstream reader. The sequential identifications of a vehicle tag allow the measurement of the travel time between the two reader locations. Through multi-agencies' initial efforts, TransCom (operators of TRANSMIT) started the TRANSMIT system installation in metropolitan areas in 1998 with 58 pilot TRANSMIT reader locations on major state highway corridors. Two out of nine MTAB&T facilities (Verrazano Narrows Bridge and Robert F. Kennedy Bridge) were part of this pilot system with a total of three reader sites installed at each bridge. The TRANSMIT system provided regional the valuable real time travel time information and was expanded through each agency thereafter. The current system has more than 250 readers throughout the Metropolitan area and is still expanding.