Eye on Opticom

Our guest on this episode is Kristin White, chief operating officer of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America). The former executive director of the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MNDOT) recently moved to Washington, DC and has ambitious plans for the nation's leading membership and advocacy group for the development and deployment of Intelligent Transportation Systems.

Here is a link to the McKinsey & Co. study referenced in the episode: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/human-capital-at-work-the-value-of-experience

Global Traffic Technologies (GTT) recently published an electronic guidebook to help agencies better understand the federal funding opportunities that are currently available. On this week's episode, we interviewed Mark Ignatowski, the author of that guidebook.

Richard Merrell is a recently retired fire captain and the former uniformed aide to the assistant fire chief in Fairfax County, VA. After moving from the state of Washington in the early 2000s, the 31-year veteran was responsible for blanketing the county with EVP as its population growth exploded. He is also married to Dr. Lori Moore-Merrell, who was appointed by President Biden as the U.S. fire administrator on Oct. 25, 2021. 

In the wake of the Opticom Signal Core launch, Kurtis McBride, co-founder and CEO of Miovision, and Global Traffic Technologies President Nicole Rennalls discuss the future of mobility, the intersection of technology and public services, and a recent partnership announced between the two companies. 

Rob Gandee has been the fire chief for the Cleveland suburb of Willoughby Hills, OH since May, 2019. An Opticom™ Infrared (IR) customer since 2017, Willoughby Hills has the technology on all of its intersections and nearly all of its vehicles to cover its own city and the neighboring village of Waite Hill, an area consisting of 15 square miles and a population of just over 10,000 residents.

Chief Scott Collard has led the North Hays County Fire/Rescue; Hays County ESD #6 for the past eight  years.  The department consists of six stations located in and around the surrounding areas of Dripping Springs, Driftwood, and Henly, Texas.

They originally deployed Opticom GPS on one intersection to get out of their fire station. Two and half years ago, North Hays built out its entire district with Opticom GPS. 

Dr. Richard B. Gasaway is the founder of firefighting consultancy Situational Awareness Matters and one of the nation's leading authorities on human error, situational awareness and high-risk decision-making processes. He has more than three decades of experience in fire, EMS, rescue and emergency management as a firefighter, EMT-paramedic, lieutenant, captain, assistant chief and fire chief. He joins us to explain what situational awareness is, why it matters, and what he thought of his experience with Opticom. 

Transit analytics is expected to be a hot topic at this week's APTA's TRANSform Conference & EXPO 2021, where GTT will be a vendor from Nov. 7-10 in Orlando. GTT Vice President of Product Development  Ravi Shah makes his second appearance on the podcast to address the rise in importance of analytics in the transit space and reveal what GTT has in the works. And if you're going to be there, be sure to stop by booth #3482! 

Pat Foster is a technical project manager who joined the client services team at Global Traffic Technologies earlier this year.

A former police officer with nearly two decades of experience, Pat retired as a lieutenant from the police department in Clay Township, Michigan. During his career, he held several positions, including overseeing the dispatch center, supervising the field training officers program, and serving as a special investigator to the medical examiners’ office. 

He eventually left law enforcement to join a public safety software company as a project manager, a role in which he was responsible for deploying new 9-1-1 systems, Computer Aided Dispatch systems, record management systems and biometric systems. 

This week's guests are Josh Lehman, a product manager at GTT, and Dave Brown, a product manager at Miovision. GTT, makers of Opticom priority control solutions, and Miovision, an Ontario, Canada-based traffic management company, now offer a priority control solution with intersection cabinet monitoring. The solution leverages Miovision’s open innovation platform to deliver proven applications like Opticom software-based, centralized priority control. This empowers traffic engineering departments to enable priority control and meet their Automated Traffic Signal Performance Measures (ATSPM) without having to add duplicative hardware devices or rip out existing infrastructure investments.