Overview
The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC), the metropolitan planning organization for the nine-county Greater Philadelphia region spanning Pennsylvania and New Jersey, launched a Regional Digital Alerting Program to better protect first responders working along the roadway. By reallocating existing Unified Planning Work Program funds, DVRPC equipped response vehicles with Haas Alert digital alerting technology at zero cost to participating agencies, delivering safety benefits years sooner than traditional grant funding would have allowed. The program now spans 671 vehicles across 149 agencies, including 34 PennDOT Freeway Service Patrol vehicles, and has sent more than 2.6 million digital alerts warning approaching motorists to slow down or move over. This case study shows how a metropolitan planning organization (MPO) moved beyond its traditional long-range planning role to deliver an operational, life-saving safety improvement at regional scale.
In this case study you will learn:
- How DVRPC repurposed existing Unified Planning Work Program funds to deploy digital alerting technology at zero cost to first responders and years ahead of traditional grant timelines
- Why DVRPC leveraged its established traffic incident management task forces to build trust, engage responder agencies, and coordinate a multidisciplinary deployment across two states and nine counties
- How a clearly structured implementation model pairing DVRPC, Newcom Global, and Haas Alert with responder agencies created a replicable framework other MPOs can use to deploy emerging safety technologies at scale