Good day and welcome to the Talking Operations Web Conference -- Planned Special Events. I will be giving a brief introduction to the web conference, to Michele, who we are have pleased. Please be advised that today's seminar is being recorded. I will start by going over a few logistical details. Today's seminar will last approximately 90 minutes about 60 minutes allocated for the presenters and the final 30 for audience question-and-answer. If you think of question, type it into the smaller text box underneath the chat area on the lower right side of your screen. Please indicate who your question is towards unless it's intend for all presenters and panelist. Please make sure that you are typing in the thin text box and not the wide area. Presenters already unable to answer your question during their presentation but Michele will be using some of the questions typed chat box for the question-and-answer session in the last 30 minutes of the seminar. You can click on the zoom icon at the bottom left of your screen. It looks like a magnifying glass with a plus sign in it. A file containing the audio and visual portion of the website will be posted to the national transportation operations coalition, otherwise known as the NTOC website within the next week. the recorded files are for viewing and listening purposes own and cannot be saved to your computer. We encourage others in your office to access the recording. The PowerPoint presentations used during the record will be available within the next week on the TOC website. Attendees will be notify of the availability of the PowerPoints, recordings and closed captioning of the seminar. At this time I would like to introduce Michele Birdsaw. Michele recently joined the institution of transportation engineers staff in a position of technical reporter. In addition to serving as the NTOC communications liaison in support of the NTOC website, newsletters and web forums she will be writing technical articles for the I.T.E. journal. She was the former editor of NASA's Spinoff Magazine and has wrote for several other governmental organizations. She as presented papers on national technology transfer efforts and is completing a master of science degree from CalTrans university. Good afternoon, everyone. As Jennifer mentioned, I am brand new, and I'm looking forward to reaching out to the NTOC community. You will be seeing and hearing more from me in the coming weeks as I reach out for new information to put on the NTOC website and come out with a newsletter and I'm very excited to be with you for my first web seminar. Our first presenter today is Captain Henry deBrees. Captain deBrees is a Captain with the New York state police and is assigned an operations program coordinator with the I-95 corridor coalition. Prior to this assignment he served as project manager of the Hudson Valley Transportation Management Center, located in Hawthorn, New York. Captain deBrees oversaw several Department of Transportation/state police projects, such as the regional coordination of the ITS designed employment, a 25 vehicle highway service patrol program, the regional contract towing and recovering programming and specialized enforcement programs relegated to the Department of Transportation initiative. Previously Captain deBrees was project manager for the region's computer aided dispatch/mobile data MTAS interphase project and oversaw the state thruway authority enforcement program, aggressive driver enforcement program and regional highway interdiction university. He's a graduate of the State University of New York and holds a master's degree from MER -- it's a college in New York. He's a 1996 graduate of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's national academy. Captain deBrees serves on committees related to the emergency transportation operations and intergradation, computer-aided dispatch system integration and traffic incident management through the transportation research board, the Federal Highway Administration, ITS, north program office and the American association of state highway and transportation officials respectively. Thank you, Captain deBree? Thank you very much. I was hoping they edited that down some, but this is my first Webinar as well, so please bear with me if I make any technical mistakes. I see from the attendees list a couple of people that actually helped with this project, so that means I have to tell the truth this afternoon. Let's bring us right into the first side. Duchess county fair doesn't sound like a really big deal but the purpose of this project was to enhance the I.T.S. capabilities and the interdisciplinary coordination between several agencies. As we were getting ready to get organized it was a good exercise to get people working together in this type of atmosphere and utilize some of the equipment and practice with some equipment that's never really been used before this way. Certainly we're able to justify such a deployment for this event, because it's -- as the slide indicates, it was the largest scheduled traffic event in the region. This fair, which has gone on for over 100 years in a very rural section of New York state, about an hour and a half north of New York City, started out with the numbers going back about 50 years, it was about 50,000 people would come to this event, and it grew as people started moving away from the city, and telecommuting and building out this area to become 500,000 people over six days, which travel to a -- what was a small country fair on a two-lane rural road, one, you know, lane in each direction and it just completely overwhelmed the community, year after year, after year. But with the marketing that was done for it, it just kept growing and it has practically shut down two local villages and blocks egress and ingress to the hospital. It was really becoming pretty much a problem. Everyone who lived locally would pretty much go away during this week. So we had much local support in trying to come up with a plan that would make sense, and then that would alleviate the problem and plus we had the internal drive to make ourselves better in I.T.S. coordination and interoperations with police, fire, EMS and others. Our short term goals at the scene was to reduce the ingress and egress. There were at times four hour delays getting into the site and out of the parking lot. We wanted to highlight the transportation system. The public and the media the most important to our own staff and our own supervisory people, as we were making a case for building this transportation management center, and making it as, you know, resourceful and robust as possible. It served a purpose to provide training of certain ITS strategies, techniques to all the people in the operations staff, of each agency and create a template for future events both at this location and other locations. One of the key problems that we had emergency communication. When you bring different groups of responders together, police, fire, EMS, and transportation, you don't have the kind of communication systems that each can speak on. Nextel is a common denominator now, but the planning for this event went back as far as 1999, and we were able to introduce Nextel into the area. We had no wireless communications that we could speak on, other than this and there was also no cellular communications in that area. Cell towers had not really made it to this rural location at this point. Having some telecommunication resources allowed us to run many of our ITS components via laptops within our command post vehicles. As a back bone of this, along with the audio communications was coming up with the variable message sign strategy that allowed us to get information in real time to the people that needed to see it, whether they were coming to the event or they were trying to get through the community or get around the community. We deployed ten signs with an inner an outer perimeter. These signs were cellularly programmable, obviously solar powered and we were able to preinstall anticipatory messages, which included messages pertaining to evacuations, should that be the case. The thought of the ferris wheel rolling down the midway was the thing that everybody always talked about. We would be able to, in a crisis, get people out and also give good messages to get people to avoid the location, not come to the site and also direct people away from the site quickly. At the same time, we developed detailed diversion plans for non-fair related traffic, so the commercial vehicles, particularly, who have historically clogged the routes, which it is somewhat of a main trucking route through this part of the county, they got plenty of warning, three or four towns away not to come here, and then we trailblazed them with good directions on how to get away. And once that was successfully done, we didn't see any commercial vehicles, buses, trucks, or the likes coming through the area at all. They did heed the warnings which was tremendous success for us. We were able to purchase a highway advisory radio unit, a portable unit, which worked in conjunction well variable message sign. These were also solar powered and cellularly programmable. We had pre-recorded play lists with the different types of traffic patterns that we had anticipated and had all of our diversion routes set up and incident notification set up, disaster plan re-recorded and the concept of working with the highway radio and the variable message sign allowed to us change our direction of traffic on the fly. We were spending a lot of time in sending people in directions that they were unfamiliar directions that they were used to going. We had to give them confidence in finding their way and coordinating these two ITS components allowed to us do that. Here's a photograph of two of those devices. We have all seen portable message signs before and there's the portable highway advisory radio system that we used and, you know, as you are driving up this road, alongside of this, most of the people that were driving in that direction did not want to be driving in that direction. So it's very important for us to tell them, even though you are heading north, we will direct you to where you need to get to, and then they would give detailed directions and the signs, you continued to follow them along their routes. And to be honest, the first year we did that, it took a while for the public to trust what we were doing and we had hundreds of illegal u turns and other things that we had to deal with. But once people got to feel comfortable that, you necessity, you know, there was going to be follow through, all the way to the end of where they were unfamiliar with, to where they were familiar with, you know, we had significantly greater success in the following years of deploying. From the southern part of the region, where there's high population and congestion, we have a service patrol program deployed and we were able to pull two of the service patrol trucks from their routine duties up to the site, and they helped us tremendously. And the public absolutely thought they were fantastic. We used them to set up extra lanes with traffic counts and any problems within the traffic problem that we were able to immediately attend to and get them out of the way, we recognized there was some key points within our diversion routes that if we did have a breakdown, it could cause a backup that we might not recover from within a reasonable amount of time. And we used them as spotted for the command post staff, so we can send them to different locations and have them report back on how traffic was going. And while we certainly didn't want to experience motor vehicle accidents, they were very effective. I think on seven different occasions on the first year, they detected motor vehicles before the first time when one call game in. Whether was non-peak, we brought a truck into the fairground area and had a driver showing off the truck at the D.O.T. location within the fair. And you would be surprised how much interest the public has. They have seen the trucks but they weren't aware of how it worked or what the fees were. In this case, there were no fees. We were able to hand out the brochures and get some good public relations on when they were not on patrol. Something that we were very keen to being on top of, and it turned out to be very beneficial to us is three months before the event, we carefully studied the state, county, and the local municipalities construction plans and had meetings with all of those entities, one in particular there was a re-decking project on the Hudson river bridge crossing, that had we not diligently done some work with the bridge contractors, their plans were to work through our event and it would have caused an insurmountable backup that we would not have had much of an effect on because the folks coming over or leaving would have backed up into the exit gates and that would have shut everything down when it was time to leave. They were, after several meetings and discussions we were able to get them to take a week off and that worked out very well for us. I spent a lot of time carefully planning how we would add capacity to this little two lane road we had. Safety was a key concern because we were going to be doing something somewhat unique and unconventional. That was putting cones out to make a center lane and while it looks on the diagram to be relatively short, for a mile and a half -- it's about a mile and a half of that center lane. It's a very, very, dark unlit area. We had to light part of the area with high-intensity construction lighting and also there were manned locations on them too and we had to make sure that they were safe as well. We didn't want to see any of our personnel getting struck with this incredible volume of traffic that was going to be coming out. There you see the bottom there, the main entrance to the fair and the main exit from the fair. And they are not that far apart. They are possibly a tenth of a mile apart. And you can imagine, everybody coming out of that exit wanting to make a left and heading south on that road, interfering with the traffic wanting to get into the fairground. Now it's hard to imagine gridlock occurring and that highlights the need of getting everybody coming out of the exits and moving north. It makes for a lot of unhappy people and a lot of knocked down cones initially. It worked out fairly well on the service patrol trucks. I had one assigned full-time to that one specific area, resetting cones and checking for disabled vehicles. We had a significant concern that we could have a southbound vehicle take the middle lane south and create the likelihood of a head-on crash, so we managed that very closely. Knock on wood. We did this for several years and we didn't have any issues whatsoever. Now, I'm seeing some notes asking me to speak up. For those that have voice on here, can everyone hear me all right? Yes. Okay. Yes, I think if you could speak a little bit louder but I think it sounds okay. Okay. So here's the photograph of the route, and the service patrol trucks setting up that extra lane and this went on well past dark. And we used all of the D.O.T. resources available to break this down so that, you know, we have the crash trucks with the barriers and all the lights and a marked state police vehicle. And, again, this is something that as the years progressed we got significantly better at. We painted some dots on the road the day before the event so that the folks setting the cones would know exactly where to put them so the lanes would insure to be wide enough. We were pushing people over on to the shoulder and you have to be very careful how you do that. Another critical element is the southbound, the one lane travelling south that's a key access route to the area hospital, and it was very easy to back that one lane up as we were trying to manage that egress from the fairgrounds. So we maintained the link with the emergency communications entity responsible for dispatching ambulances and when we got the word to clear that lane for an incoming ambulance, we were able to do that in moments and that was a key -- I'm just reading the notes. I'm sorry. That was a key element to us. And, again, I'm hoping that everybody can see and hear okay. I'm a little confused by some of the notes in the chatroom. Yeah, I think you are fine. Keep on going. Okay. Within the first year of doing this, setting up all of these elements in concert with one another, that four-hour delay getting out of the exit gate which used to lead to 911 calls and fistfights and fender benders and at one point had the parking lot staff leave the area for fear of their own safety, we were able to completely eliminate that exit gate delay. And, you know he which was a tremendous benefit, not just to the fair goers but to the community and the public safety people that were responsible for getting people in and out of there. A key element that allowed us to maintain that egress was -- there are two, one is the south and one is the north of this event that were pretty much allowed to run on their own. They worked fine during ordinary congestion in this region. But with that type of traffic flow, they were completely overwhelmed. We had an engineer on site that would run back and forth and try to time the lights but that was not really the best way to do things. At the one traffic light, we were able to get the installation of a microwave detector, which measured the queue and did a much better job than a person running between two signals could do. And another signal, the more busier of the two, the Department of Transportation installed a portable closed circuit TV camera system that fed us the video feed from that signal to our command post and with that signal, we had preemption capability for the light. This light -- I'm not a signal expert but it had all the magnet gap timings and probably one of the more modern setups for a six-lane -- or excuse me, there were eight lanes, each one had a left turn lane that would activate when necessary. The signal worked extraordinarily well under normal circumstances but we rally needed to maintain that egress from the event. The cameras allowed to us see when that was failing, so that we could hold that green time a little bit longer and, you know if there's any one thing that made this a successful exercise this was it. We talked a little bit about communications. The Nextel program is used by the help service patrol program down in the southern part of the region. We recognized we didn't have cellular coverage in the area, which made working with the variable message signs very difficult. We didn't have Nextel in this area either, but we were a very good Nextel customer and we had meetings with them several months prior to the event and they volunteered to bring a device up to the fairground site that would allow a portable antenna. They call it cellular on wheels this. Allowed to us community with the state police, traffic details, the command post and fairgrounds parking staff, the signal crew who were working the traffic signals and the toll booth people and the help vehicles also had them. So we instantly had a telecommunications system that was usable in an interdisciplinary environment. We were not worried about whether we were giving private people the police band radios or anything like that. It solved pretty much all the communication problems relatively instantly. So the big joke is that the cellular on wheels was the first cow that the state police ever brought to the fair. And if we wanted to let people to make their left turns and go in the direction that they move, we could change the advisable signs. And I pushed a button and give the command and the command post could do their thing, and suddenly the patterns would change and it worked very, very well. Here's some slides of the cellular on wheels being deployed. The local fire department helped out with that. And they since installed a permanent tower at that location. We had the desire to get a good handle on how many vehicles were actually coming to this event, whether the numbers that were being claimed by the fairgrounds were, in fact the case and we also want to test the data for future events so that, you know, didn't have to keep conning back with my same staff, year after year see what flow times were, and over the two or three years that we were looking to get those counts, we tried a couple of different things. One of which you will see highlighted here is this little electronic map that has a counter in it, and there's a port that you can plug in the courter to your laptop and it draws all kinds of neat graphs, pretty much anything you could want to find out about your traffic flow. And most of you have probably seen this stuff since. The second year, we used a different technology, produced pretty much the same results. The graphs were a little bit more sharp and that was the acoustic detectors that were also portable and we would set them up without having to go out to the road and nail things to the road. They would just point down it the individual lanes that you wanted to get counts at. And they both worked pretty much the same. I wouldn't recommend one or the other with the exception of not to nail something down but the tradeoff is you have another device that's out there capable of being struck so it's probably somewhat of a tradeoff. Again, this is just another example of the types of graphs. These things can tell you how fast the vehicles are moving, how long they are, it keeps a count of traffic keeps flowing and keeps an accurate count of the cars. We did do some manual counting during the lesser peak periods to have a comparison and it was he very, very accurate. We thought that this would be a good opportunity to explain what ITS was to the public and the media, particularly with a very large transportation management center project on the immediate horizon. So we were also trying to desensitize people to the big brother issues that they might have when they see signs and cameras and other devices that D.O.T.s are now deploying on their highway infrastructure. So when people were sending letters in talking about their traffic improving, there had already been some editorial articles written on what we were trying to do and they were easily related to the technologies that were deployed. At the same time, you know, when we went and did other things with the media, they were already familiar with us, due to a win, which is always nice to say, hey, you remember us from that thing that worked rather than remember us from that disaster that happened. And when we expanded the service patrol program or did other deployments, as the TMC was being built, these were positive relationships that, you know, were good to have. We were able to get a, a nice article in the "New York Times," the "Sunday times" as a matter of fact on the transportation management center, attend related to, you know, their original exposure to what we were trying to do through the duchess county fair. In conclusion, this was, at the time, the most comprehensive role of ITS for a planned event in New York state. We feel that the public did understand what we were trying to do and by the second and subsequent years, people were responding to the highway messages on the radio and the signs. They were complying. We really did receive a significant number of accolades for reducing that exiting queue to zero. We were able to do this with no accidents attributable to our traffic patterns or the devices or the directions we were giving people