San Antonio/El Paso Region

Description

El Paso, along with its sister city of Ciudad Juarez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, comprise the largest bi-national metropolitan area in the world. The inherent complexity resulting from its geographic situation and intense international economic activity, make El Paso a unique location to conduct state-of-the-art research on a wide variety of transportation issues. View a map to this office’s location.

The TTI San Antonio Research and Implementation Office (SA RIO) has partnered with Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) Districts and local agencies in south Texas region since 1993. The SA RIO performs practical research in the traffic engineering, traffic operations, safety and emergency preparedness areas and assists local agencies and organizations link research findings to implementation practices through the transfer of technology. View a map to this office’s location.

The focus of infrastructure management is to optimize the use of the transportation infrastructure during major emergencies through the application of existing technology, development of new technologies and unified inter-agency response. This effort will focus primarily on two major areas of need in major military deployments and natural disasters.

Research units within the SA RIO include:

• Research and Implementation – El Paso, and
• Research and Implementation – San Antonio.

Expertise

Researchers in the El Paso and San Antonio Research and Implementation Office have experience in many areas of transportation research, including the following:

• Transportation system operation,
• Hurricane and emergency evacuation,
• Teen driver safety,
• Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications,
• Transportation operations modeling,
• Arterial and freeway operations,
• Traffic engineering and operations,
• Transit planning,
• Safety,
• Trade and transport facilitation,
• Multi-modal transport and freight operations,
• Border crossing,
• Homeland security,
• Air quality,
• Infrastructure finance,
• Public- private partnerships, and
• Tolling and managed lanes.

Cooperative Relationships/Sponsors

The El Paso and San Antonio Research and Implementation Office maintains cooperative relationships with the following sponsors:

• TxDOT,
• University of Texas at El Paso,
• El Paso Metropolitan Area Organization, and
• SunMetro.

For More Information

Rafael Aldrete, Ph.D.