MD Transportation Authority Police for ICC

[OldsDoug]

It's just been announced that the first hunk of the Inter-County Connector will open on Feb. 22. It is to be patrolled by the Maryland Transportation Authority Police. Does anyone have any information on what frequency / radio system they will be using? There are two theories going around; one, that they would use one of their existing UHF frequencies with a separate "private line" tone and two, that they will be assigned a talk group on the Montgomery County radio system, but I haven't seen anything firm on either (or anything else.)

There was a previous thread about this, I think, but it must have expired.

Thanks-

 

[ka3jjz]

As an aside to Doug's question, I didn't know anything about the ICC, but wikipedia does...

Maryland Route 200 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Why would MTA be the only one to patrol this road? Couldn't PG and/or Montgomery do so too? Or would they have to wait for MTA to make a call? Will there be an interop channel for this, given that Montgomery and PG county's systems are different? And what about MSP?

Lots of questions...Mike

 

[OldsDoug]

Hi Mike, when I first got to wondering who would patrol ICC (and how I could listen to them!), I did a little digging on all the different websites and found out that the MD Transportation Authority Police are the group that used to be known as the Toll Facilities Police... somewhere along the line they got BWI Airport too, so they "own" that, the bay bridge, the Nice Bridge, the Fort McHenry tunnel, etc. A complete list is on their website, Maryland Transportation Authority Police And since the ICC is a toll road, I guess they were given that. (I was curious about whether the state would give Montgomery County some funding to cover the cost of patrolling.)

Another thing I found is that there is another (separate and distinct!) bunch called the Maryland Transit Administration Police; Maryland Transit Administration They deal mainly with the light rail and subway around Baltimore.

Mud?

When I'm elected King of Maryland I'm gonna lump all this stuff and the Univ of MD police, etc., together under the State Police! I'll also raise the speed limit on that road to 80!!



Yeah, I have the same questions you do, and I'll be interested to see what happens in real life!

DK

 

[ka3jjz]

Actually we have this laid out in our database pretty well - it's under 'Department of Transportation'.

Anyway I was thinking about what freqs MTA might press into service, and I came up with 3 likely possibilities, keeping in mind here that this is sheer speculation and not based on any hard evidence;

866.3625 - PMARS - This would make sense from an interoperability perspective.

453.9750 - The NIce bridge is a good haul from Montgomery county; barring skip conditions, interference ought to be minimal

453.4750 - The former McHenry Tunnel freq, since abandoned when they went back to 453.10. This one makes sense since they already had radios outfitted with this frequency

Of course, all this reasoning actually goes out the window - it makes sense, and governments rarely, if ever, work that way.

The obvious question here is has anyone seen any radio towers in the area of the ICC that were constructed at the time as the corridor? The antennas on that would at least be a hint.

best regards Mike

 

[ocguard]

For an ATTEMPT at reducing confusion with regards to abbreviations...
The Maryland Transportation Authority is typically abbreviated as MdTA
The Maryland Transit Administration (formerly Mass Transit Administration, buses and light rail, including their own PD) is abbreviated as MTA

Both the MdTA and the MTA fall under the auspices of the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT), along with the State Highway Administration, Motor Vehicle Administration, Maryland Port Administration, and the Maryland Aviation Administration. Who says we don't have big government!

The MdTA Police have jurisdiction over all revenue-generating transportation mediums within MD, with the exception of the Maryland Transit Administration (buses, subway, MARC train, and light rail) and the JFK Highway (see below).

Also an interesting side-not, the JFK Memorial Highway, which is all of I-95 from the northeast beltway interchange to the DE state line, is considered a toll road (even though you only pay the toll once and can travel 50% of the road toll-free). Because of this, it is the jurisdiction of the MdTA Police, but they contract with the MD State Police for patrol service. This contract is set to expire in the not-so-distant future, which could be interesting. This is why MD State Police cars assigned to the JFK Highway barrack tend to be more "decked-out" than the rest of the MSP fleet. MdTA also provides the famous red, white, and blue unmarked muscle cars used by MSP to patrol the JFK.

 

[OldsDoug]

Thanks, Matt, good explanation, you've done a better job here of reducing confusion than the State!

(But I guess that's not giving you much credit, given the job they've done of mucking it up!)

Regards,

Doug