In a stunning display of cross-border cooperation that absolutely nobody asked for, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) and the Oklahoma Department of Transportation (ODOT) have officially signed a real-time data-sharing agreement. Because if there is one thing Texans traditionally love, it’s giving Oklahoma total visibility into our business. The agencies are hailing this as a “major step forward in regional collaboration,” which is just government-speak for connecting two computer systems so bureaucrats on both sides of the Red River can watch you pick your nose in gridlock.
Under this new pact, the two states are actively trading data on traffic camera live streams, incident reports, lane closures, and speed volumes. They allegedly fast-tracked the system to handle the impending doom of World Cup travel traffic. Officials from the U.S. Department of Transportation are even calling it a potential “model for other states,” seemingly blind to the fact that the rest of the country usually tries to avoid looking more like Texas and Oklahoma, not less.
While suits in Austin and Oklahoma City hype this up as a “resilient transportation network,” anyone with a healthy distrust of state surveillance is probably sweating through their shirt right now. The government is getting full, frictionless access to an interconnected web of real-time camera imagery and travel time tracking, with future plans to monitor truck routing and “special-event” coordination. We’ve all seen how much certain entities love abusing camera data and tracking tech in the past, so handing over a massive, multi-state digital dragnet to state agencies seems totally safe and foolproof.
But hey, look on the bright side: the next time you are trapped in a blistering, multi-hour highway delay because TxDOT decided to close three lanes of traffic for a single, unattended orange cone, some guy in Oklahoma will be able to pull up your camera feed and laugh at your misery in glorious high-definition. Isn’t regional progress beautiful?
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