Chicago Workshop Profile: RTA's Regional Transportation Asset Management System (RTAMS)

[The RTAMS website was profiled at the Oct 2005 TFLEx Workshop held in Chicago by the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA). This excerpt is from the RTA Reports newsletter. More information is available to members under the Conferences section.]

Have you ever wanted to know just what capital improvements are planned for your community? Or have you ever been curious about how many people use a particular train station or how many parking spaces are available at that station? Do you need to find a copy of a specific planning study? The RTA is providing the answers to these and many other questions about transportation and planning in northeastern Illinois with a public version of its online transit information system.

The RTA's Regional Transportation Asset Management System (RTAMS) web site http://www.rtams.org became available to the public on June 23. RTAMS provides detailed planning and financial information about the transportation systems in northeastern Illinois. Users can search and cross-reference RTAMS's data sets, including the location of transportation assets and services, public transit ridership, Tollway traffic volumes, planning studies, transit sales tax revenues and political jurisdictions. The site also includes information from the 2030 Regional Transportation Plan, the regional traffic signal inventory, aerial imagery, and land use maps. RTAMS was developed by the RTA in coordination with the CTA, Metra, Pace, the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority (Tollway), the Chicago Area Transportation Study (CATS), the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission (NIPC) and the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC).

Originally designed as an in-house tool for RTA staff, the RTAMS information system has evolved into an extensive intermodal transportation web site popular among transportation professionals, elected officials and advocacy groups. The region's transportation agencies have had access to RTAMS since 2002, and municipalities have had access since 2003. RTA officials felt RTA Shares The Wealth: Transportation Data Go Public Online at www.rtams.org that the introduction of a public version of the RTAMS site was the next logical step.

"Chicago has the second largest transit system in the nation. Our goal was to package the wealth of data about our transportation system so that professionals and members of the public could easily search and find information about how transportation is funded, planned, and used in northeastern Illinois," said RTA Executive Director Paula S. Thibeault. "The RTAMS web site enables users to examine our transportation system from both regional and localized perspectives."

Thus far, response to the public release of the RTAMS web site has been favorable. Traffic on the site has increased three-fold since June 23. RTA staff is continuing to expand the web site capabilities and work with other partners to add new content.

Access RTAMS at http://www.rtams.org or by clicking on the RTAMS logo on the RTA web site http://www.rtachicago.com. Users are required to create an RTAMS account through a simple online form.