Sixteen students from USC and CSULB visited the Los Angeles Regional Transportation Management Center (LARTMC) on March 25^th for a field trip organized by METRANS Transportation Center. By interacting with Caltrans staff and touring the state-of-the-art facilities, students were able to gain valuable insights while learning in detail about the duties and daily operations of the LARTMC.

Photo by Lynn Feng, USC MPL 2016

The two-hour tour began with an overview of Caltrans District 7 and the LARTMC. Allen Chen, Senior Transportation Engineer at Caltrans, provided the group with a thorough account of the agency’s history, operations, and development. He also introduced some of the newest transportation innovations that the LARTMC is seeking to implement, such as Active Traffic Management (ATM) that can be used to mitigate congestion. The topic intrigued the audience and elicited several questions from the crowd, turning the informative presentation into an engaging conversation towards the end.

After the presentation, Mr. Chen led the group on a visit to the core of the LARTMC – the operations and management center. At the front of the room, students saw multiple large screens showing local news and live traffic video feeds, while other real-time information was also displayed on LED boards. As noted by Mr. Chen, several thousand incidents are reported to the LARTMC on a daily basis, and hundreds of them will require action. Therefore, the California Highway Patrol (CHP) occupies a section of the room to respond to such situations.

The students then ended the tour in the emergency operations room and the basement of the LARTMC, where Mr. Chen highlighted the building’s sturdiness for potential seismic events. He pointed out that the center can withstand earthquakes up to magnitude 8.0 on the Richter scale because of the particular way the base of the building was engineered, so that even in extreme conditions the LARTMC would still be able to perform its functions.

Students appear to be very satisfied with the experience both for its content and METRANS’ organization. Haneesh Marella, a student in CSULB’s Master of Science in Supply Chain Management program, shared that the tour “was very informative.”

Wenhao Zhang

Wenhao Zhang is a second-year Master of Planning student at the USC Price School.  He is interested in topics such as urban design, sustainable planning, and public transportation.  His expected date of graduation is May 2016.  He can be reached at [email protected].