It’s hard to believe this all began in 1986 as a grant from the Federal Highway Administration to create the McTrans Center. With the introduction of personal computers and the proliferation of software for the traffic engineering and transportation planning profession, a mechanism was needed to connect research to practice – and McTrans is still filling that need thirty years later!
The grant ended in 1988 and McTrans became completely self-supporting with no funding beyond revenue from end users for software, support and training. It’s quite a success story for the government to create a start-up that has grown tenfold since.
The Highway Capacity Software (HCS) has been the most consistent and important product for McTrans. Released initially in 1987, then upgraded with each major change in the Highway Capacity Manual, now developing HCS7 for release with the HCM 6th Edition this summer. TSIS-CORSIM and TRANSYT-7F have also been mainstays as software maintained and supported by McTrans over the years.
Some early milestones included establishing the McLink (1991) electronic bulletin board system (prior to web sites); establishing a toll-free hotline (1992); offering agency licenses (1993); converting HCS to Windows (1998); creating an online catalog (2003); taking over CORSIM development (2007); and introducing full signal timing optimization within the Streets module (2013).
Recently, McTrans has been on research teams developing the HCM 6th Edition; implementing procedures for analyzing alternative intersections; building travel time reliability mechanisms for urban streets and freeway facilities; and collaborating with a software prototype for modeling the interaction between intersections and freeways at interchanges – all while concurrently converting HCS modules to a more efficient and user friendly architecture and presenting webinar series on capacity analysis and traffic engineering fundamentals.
All of us are sincerely grateful for the tremendous support received from so many agencies, colleagues and especially users – McTrans has never been more successful. McTrans will continue to be as responsive and helpful as possible going forward to maintain your support and trust. Please know that we understand that you are the reason McTrans still exists!
Thanks,
The McTrans Team