Abstract Manager

In 2016, Halton Region began developing an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) strategy to enhance regional road operations and maintenance. In this initiative, the Region planned to deploy an Advanced Traffic Management System (ATMS) to enable remote monitoring and control of Regional signals by Regional staff – a responsibility previously managed by the local municipalities. ATMS procurement and deployment began in 2019, followed by a four-year effort to integrate 113 Regional signals in Oakville to the Region’s ATMS, delayed by challenges due to COVID-19 and other parallel priorities and constraints, such as IT and telecommunication infrastructure, establishment of a traffic monitoring centre, ATMS integration complication and vendor support, and cybersecurity-related data sharing and system access regulations.

In early 2025, the Region repositioned the ATMS initiative as a capital delivery project led by the Engineering & Construction (E&C) division, initiating the development of a Project Charter. This shift enabled increased resource engagement and established clear objectives, fostering collaboration with all stakeholders to realign the initiative with the new strategic mandate. By Q3 2025, the Region achieved full ATMS connectivity for 106 signals in Milton and Halton Hills, a milestone attributed to early, proactive collaboration with Region IT, which fostered innovative solutions to connectivity challenges.

The 2025 integration effort yielded important lessons to be shared with fellow practitioners. The project underscored the importance of robust asset management, as comprehensive audits of existing infrastructure and signal inventories were required to address telecommunications gaps. Early coordination among Region Road Operations (the service users), IT (the telecommunications contract holder), and municipal partners proved essential to align project delivery with contractual and service-level expectations of all parties. Furthermore, identifying short-term successes while maintaining a long-term strategic perspective was key. For instance, the team decided to procure LTE services to address immediate connectivity needs, while simultaneously informing plans to transition to a fibre network when feasible, retaining LTE for redundancy.

Additional lessons included the benefits of cultivating direct relationships with maintenance contractors to reduce delays in field infrastructure auditing, hardware procurement, and installation, and the value of identifying opportunities to standardize and enhance telecommunications infrastructure. These improvements aim to reinforce inventory management, redundancy, and reliability while balancing CAPEX vs. OPEX. Halton Region will apply these insights to future signal connectivity phases, including upcoming connectivity of 72 Regional signals in Burlington scheduled for 2026.