The cities of Moorhead, Fargo, and West Fargo, in collaboration with NDDOT, MnDOT, Metro COG, MATBUS, Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute, and several engineering and technology vendors, are excited to announce a collaborative award of $2 million for a regionalized and coordinated SMART Signal System through the USDOT SMART Grant program. The Moorhead-led team competed against 308 eligible proposals to be one of 34 successful recipients.
The proposed project intends to deploy strategic field hardware and cloud-based software to better respond to traffic incidents and disruptions, prepare the system for them, and predict traffic responses. This is a big first step towards a Traffic Operations Center (TOC), which can manage regional traffic patterns and incidents on a 24/7 basis to enhance transportation safety, improve transit travel-time reliability, and improve equity through systemwide resiliency. TOCs are commonplace across the nation's metro areas, and this project will not only bring the region on par with national practices but also help make the Moorhead-Fargo-West Fargo area one of the country's most predictable and resilient transportation systems.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) authorized and appropriated $100 million annually for the Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation (SMART) Grants Program. SMART funds State, local, and Tribal governments to conduct demonstration projects focused on advanced smart city or community technologies and systems to improve transportation efficiency and safety. The program is structured in two stages, in which applicants initially seek Stage 1 Planning and Prototyping Grants. Selected projects are then eligible to apply for Stage 2 Implementation Grants. Stage 1 Grants are capped at $2 million and an 18-month period; Stage 2 Grants are anticipated to be up to $15 million and 36 months.
