UPDATE: Friday, October 16th, 2015
The 2015 National Rural ITS Conference was held August 9-12, at the Snowbird Ski Resort in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. In keeping with the venue’s mountainous locale, the goal of the conference was to "Elevate ITS by Traversing the Terrain to Rural ITS." Technical sessions covered a wide breadth of topics including traveler information, variable speed limits, road weather, operations, connected vehicles, asset management, and workforce development. The agenda included a tour of several innovative intersections deployed by Utah DOT and a look at UDOT’s Statewide Traffic Operations Center in Salt Lake City.
Session B1 Using Partnerships to Improve Traveler Information provided some examples of how inter-agency and inter-state cooperation can improve delivery of traveler information. Doug Galarus presented Expansion of the Western States One Stop Shop for Rural Traveler Information. Sean Campbell provided additional insight and perspective as a roundtable panelist for the session.
Photo by Doug Galarus |
Photo by Doug Galarus |
The One-Stop-Shop now covers 11 states with numerous different layers and thousands of field elements providing information about road and travel conditions, current and forecast weather, and other information of interest such as rest areas and truck scales. Doug and Sean first described the One-Stop-Shop website by showing images and screenshots demonstrating the various features and functionality of the site. They discussed the technologies and approaches used to expand the site’s coverage from four to eleven western states and the lessons learned from the effort. Doug shared changes in usage statistics after the expansion was implemented as well as a number of media articles, videos, and links associated with the expansion. Sean and Doug then discussed with the session attendees next steps and future plans for the project including adding missing field elements for current states, adding layers (e.g., fire), addressing mobile use, and covering more states.
You can review the complete presentation here or on the OSS Documents page. You can read more about NRITS and how the WSRTC was involved, in the Consortium update from October 16th, 2015. This presentation and the others from the 2015 NRITS Conference can be found in the Proceedings at http://www.nationalruralitsconference.org/past-events/.