Castle Rock is working with Washington State DOT (WSDOT) to integrate CARS (Condition Acquisition and Reporting System) with the DOT’s CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) system. CARS-CAD, as the module will be known, will broaden the reach of CARS to include incident reporting and response activities not only of the TMC but also of related agencies at the state and local levels. Examples of such stakeholders include state police, secondary responders, and other agencies involved in emergency management.

In most states, information-sharing between DOT and other agencies in the emergency management field already takes place, through both formal and informal arrangements. Such exchanges typically occur through phone calls, faxes, and emails. In some places, such as Washington where many TMCs and state patrol field offices are collocated, face-to-face communication is also common.

The purpose of the current project is to begin formalizing and automating some of the informal information-sharing practices between DOTs and other stakeholder agencies by leveraging and expanding the tools already built into CARS.

The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) initiated the integration project in order to investigate and test the feasibility of an automatic or semi-automatic data exchange between its regional Traffic Management Centers (TMCs), the Washington State Patrol (WSP), and a secondary responder.

The two systems involved in the data exchange are WSDOT’s Condition Acquisition and Reporting System and WSP’s Computer-Aided Dispatch program. CARS is the primary data entry tool for road and traffic condition reporting at the TMCs and also serves as the data engine for WSDOT’s statewide traveler information services.

The primary objective of the project is to implement a data transfer between CAD and CARS so that pertinent accident and event information automatically appears in CARS. After the incident data is transferred to CARS, it is shared with the public through 511 and the WSDOT traveler information web site.

For more information on WSDOT CAD, please contact: