welcome to the talking operations web seminar. I am Eric your audio coordinator. All participants are in a listen-only mode. If you require assistance, please press star 0 and a coordinator will assist you. If you experience difficulty please contact WebEx technical support. As a reminder, this is being recorded. I turn the presentation over to the host. Jocelyn bower from CAA IC. We will provide afternoon overview of the 2007 traffic signal report card. I will grief give a brief introduction. The seminar will last approximately 90 minutes, the first 60 for the presenter and the final 30 for questions. You can type questions into the smaller text box under the chat area, indicate who the question is for. Type into the small box, presenters will be unable to answer during presentations, but some of the questions will be used for the Question and Answer session in the last 30 minutes of the seminar. If you would like to zoom in on the slide on your screen you can click on the zoom in. Looks like a magnifying glass with a plus sign. The session is being recorded, a file containing the audio and visual portions will be posted, on -- within the next week. I will type that address in shortly. Due to the size of the files, recorded files are only for listening and not savable to your computer. The PowerPoint presentations used during the recording will be available within the next week on the site as well. Attendees will be notified -- at this time I will like to introduce Eddie Curtis. The moderator of today's webcast. A member of the Federal Highway Resource Center operation technical service team. He joined federal highway in February of 2006 and previously worked for the city of Los Angeles in traffic operations and research. He's a registered professional engineer in California. Thank you for the introduction. I would like to welcome everyone to the 2007 traffic signal operation self-assessment and national report card webcast. We have four distinguished speakers today who will speak on a variety of topics, primarily connect the 2004 and 2007 report card, discuss changes from the 2004 self-assessment and talk about improvements, benefits to the traffic signal community as a whole and benefits to the individual agencies who choose to participate. From a federal highway perspective, one of the key objectives of the traffic signal report card and traffic assessment is to bring more attention to a need for additional sustained investment in traffic signals. As many of us know, the decision makers, stakeholders, politicians, have a lot on their plate in terms of what's needed for transportation, funding for potholes, transit, HOV lanes, pricing, marking, you name it. Typically the perception is as long as the signals are going red, yellow and green they are operating effectively. Many of us in the community know that's not the case. I estimated something like $20 billion invested in traffic signals nation-wight, wide, we need to operate to optimum effectiveness. That's where the report card comes in, to bring a level of awareness to our decision makers that we can do a better job of operating the traffic signals. The federal highway administration, members and representatives from ITE ooh , IMSA and Intack, and consultants. Before the first speaker, one thing to point out, the last day to complete the assessment to be included in the report card is -- it will remain available but your results won't be included in the national report card. Once you complete the assessment, submit you will receive a certificate of completion, press at kit, new addition to this year's effort, and an audit guide a allowing you have to a more detailed view. The national traffic signal R-789 card will be available this summer, 2007. 17 days left to complete the self-assessment. With that I would like to introduce our first speaker, Marshall analyzer, involved in traffic signals since the early 80s, includes public, private sector practice in the installation, management of several urban traffic control systems, both advanced traffic management systems and freeway management systems. Responsibilities included conceptualization, planning, design, installation and operation of systems. Principal engineer with Gresham Smith partners in Nashville, Tennessee, the engineering and planning architecturing firm, previously worked as public works director for the city of Modesto, California, and director of transportation for Arlington Texas. Thanks, Eddie, we appreciate it. I am going over overviews of the report card, where it began, first assessment completed, performed in 2004, announced, published in 2005. Of course the purpose of the report card is to determine how well the nation overall -- to build a case for investment, a tongs attention, and provide a benchmarking tool, can be useful at the local level. There are six emphasis areas in the initial assessment, and there still are. These are the current assessment areas. They are in a little different order in the current assessment than the first one, but they cover management, signal operations at individual intersections, operation in coordinated systems, signal timing practices, traffic monitoring and data collection and maintenance. I I I want to reiterate, all responses were anonymous, still are anonymous, and local agency can decide to share information with whom ever they like, but as far as the assessment process goes, that information will remain anonymous. > in the 2005 report card there were it 378 represented, 62 counties, a very diverse and broad coverage of the types of jurisdictions that own and operate traffic signals. A good distribution between population in those agencies and the signal system size represented by the agencies. Now, for some disturbing news, maybe isn't a surprise to most of us, but overall the score that those 378 agencies gave to their traffic signal operations was a D minus. You can see the scores here in the six areas and overall, management detection, the two areas that scored the lowest. Individual intersections scored the highest, something I can understand. Folks do a good job intersection to intersection, but system coordination, having resource to imagine manage, maintain, that's where the challenge comes in. Why such a low score? The signals are operating, changing color, but not operating efficiently in many jurisdiction disks, s, keeping up to date with technology, fine-tuned, providing maximum benefit to the travelling public is not always there. The resources that are made available are often times spent on minimum maintenance and fighting fires, as equipment fails, needs to be replaced, keeping up with minimum requirements. Notice here from this graph the large systems tend to score higher than the national average. The smaller systems noticeably lower. That's generally a reasonable result considering there's often more sophistication, resources applied in larger systems than in the smaller, small urban systems. If you look at the results by agency type, you will see there was fairly equal scoring, states higher in some of the six categories. There was a fairly equal representation amongst the agency types. Other findings, the management category, agencies scored themselves as an F, 68% have no documented management plan or manage ad hoc. In terms of coordinated operations, the core is D minus, over half the respondents don't conduct -- maybe do it when somebody calls in or occasional need is documented. C minus, the highest category, but 75% have no documented process to trigger timing reviews. About a third have no regular process for collecting data to base their signal timing and retiming on, and maintenance, D plus. The agencies have minimum staff to apply.what we learn from all this, the nation as a whole doesn't support signal operations well, most manage fighting fires, generally inefficient operations due to resource limitations. Everyone recognizes there could be large benefits from only small investments in traffic signal systems. We can do better. Looking at resources, what's been estimated, we could easily, to improve operations, apply a quarter billion dollars a s year to signal hardware, maintenance, total of billion a year, if you look at that, one% of what's currently spent on highway transportation. Without considering the whole, could be significant benefits in the efficiency of the signal system. If we had the resources for a higher score, were able to apply the improvements, delay would see significant decreases, travel times reduced, emissions reduced, all of those things that come with good signal operations and timing. Just to look at what happened with that information, in 2005, press packages sent to participants, results publicized, practitioners, press conference in April of 2005. Advanced media relations, radio reviews, several other advanced media activities. Day of the conference there were eight outlets covering the press release, interviews with TV, radio and print and a number following that. The AP story was used, distributed throughout the U.S., a USA on page 3 story, national radio and TV covered the signal report card, 400 local TV stories and local print stories. The participants were evaluated. 193 responded, half said the tool was useful, reasonably accurate, recommended be repeat odd a three-to-five year schedule. If you look at what happened, you will notice that about 56% got no media attention, but 30% got print, 34% TV, and --% radio coverage. For the local media, 77% no outreach and 3% held press conferences. Really, not as much activity getting the word out as maybe we all would have liked, hoped. But 28% of the respondent said the -- when asked, do you think you will get more resources after this, five% said yes, 35% maybe, 40% were pessimistic and --% said no. Evaluation, 57% said the report card was good for the agency, recommended the scheduled repeat of assessment, and 78% said it's good for the transportation community, reasonably accurate, 95% would participate gain. The next task, for your information, the signal action team that developed this assessment initially has taken on a new initiative, that's to develop a traffic signal audit guide, outcome oriented, conducted by an independent team, identify ways to improve traffic signal operations. That's operations at intersection, corridor and or system level. Hopefully in 2007 we can get that product developed and out for use by agencies. Eddie, that's the end of this initial presentation. Thank you, Marshall, based on the slides you showed in terms of cost I needed to revisit my comments about the $20 million investment. That was based on traffic signal equipment, doesn't include research or control systems, just signal heads and poles out on the street and controllers. So definitely there are a lot more involved than those components. That definitely accounts for the large difference in figures that we had. I want to do remind inch on everyone on the call if you have a question you can type it in to the chat box and we will address the questions at the end. Next speaker is Woody Hood, Chief of design division for the Maryland highway division. Been with the administration since 1982, worked in traffic engineering field since 1987. Previously Woody spent 15 years as program manager for the state highway administration traffic signal timing optimization program, that included managing the daily timing and operation of -- containing 1275 traffic signals across the state. Woody has extensive experience in timing and operation of traffic responsive systems and developed several unique phasing concepts to increase flow. Woody was a 2003 recipient of the Washington D.C. -- transportation award, serving as peer reviewer for the traffic signal timing manual, and trainer and signal timing and operations area for ITE and university of Maryland -- center. Thanks, everyone. The purpose of my presentation today is to briefly touch on some of the differences, improvements we made in the 2007 version of the signal self assessment. What we tried to do is revise the assessment based on some of the comments we received on the initial version. We 789 to Wanted to keep the format as close to the original version as possible, to have the opportunity to continually go back and compare previous versions, see how we are doing or improving. As Mentioned, we want to continue to track our progress and bring emphasis to the area of traffic timing and signal operations. We wanted to keep it anonymous, but give respondents the opportunity to load local data, to procure resources and technical 179 if needed. What's different in the 2007 assessment from the original version. What we try to do in the new version is change the formatting of some of the questions to make them more process, more outcome oriented. We defined benchmarks, questions, the layout, we revised that area slightly, added a new topic area, some of the questions from the first assessment that we didn't feel were good questions, we eliminated some of those, revised, combined some, keeping the basic format of the six sections. Also, one of the things we wanted to do, in the original version there wasn't a very good process to be able to 079 out of a question if it didn't apply. Opt out. We wanted to give you a clear-cut way if a question did not apply to your area it wouldn't be held against you in your final result. As Marshall mentioned, the 2005 version of the assessment had principle sections, management, operations, coordinated systems, operation of individual intersections, specialized operation for SML, detection systems and maintenance. The 2007 version of the assessment, we KE79 the maintenance section, reordered the individual intersections and coordinated systems sections to provide kind of a more progressive flow in those areas. We eliminated the specialized operation section, changed that to be the signal timing practices section. We've taken the section that was formerly titled -- detection systems, expanded to make it cover traffic monitoring and data collection. We felt more emphasis needed to be placed on a good data collection system, basically utilizing the advanced capabilities systems have to pull in data. And the maintenance section was the last one left. Principle changes, I will go into examples. We wanted to make the questions process or outcome oriented. Revised, some of the questions eliminated. Redefine benchmarks, we felt some were arbitrary, wanted to make the benchmarks a little more clear-cut, match them better to the questions they were referring to. One of the things we wanted to do was eliminate any perceived slight for central based system versus closed loop, some of the feedback we got on the initial version. We modified the questions so really there's no comparison between the two. We wanted to focus in on are you using the systems versus which one you have. Again, wanted to provide ability to opt out of a question if you didn't feel it was applicable to your area. A couple of examples of how we changed some of the questions. In the original version of the assessment question 41, does your agency commit resources in alignment with industry guidelines for section maintenance? In the original version the benchmarks were based around older criteria for a ratio of signal technicians to signals. Based on the newer solid-state equipment we didn't think that was really applicable. In the 2007 assessment we've kept the same general focus of the question, but made it more, again, process or outcome oriented. The benchmarks now are based upon what your response time is, not how many technicians in additions technicians you have. We want to do change that, focus in more on what your response procedures and times are. Example of how we redefined some of the benchmarks. Many of the questions in the first assessment, the way the benchmarks were set up, simply for a score of, your agency -- gave a bunch of different things you could possibly be doing. We have tried to, in the newer version of the assessment, set up the question so that if you are doing this, this, and this you score on one, this, this, and this plus this you score on two. We tried to graduate the scale to make it easier, less arbitrary on how you pick your score on the 1 to 5 score, and the ability to 079 out of a question if it's not applicable. Interjurisdictional signal coordination, in the original version, question 18, do you coordinate signal timing to across jurisdictional boundaries -- again, the benchmarks there weren't really process or outcome oriented. It was more are you or are you not doing it. In the newer assessment it's placed into a different area, does your agency have cross-jurisdictional -- coordination of operations and place the benchmarks on a 1 to fiche 5 scale. If you talk to your neighbors frequently you will obviously score higher. We tried to refined benchmarks. One of the questions you can opt out of, not all jurisdictions will have the ability or opportunity to have an interjurisdictional al cooperation agreement. An area we didn't emphasize enough in the original assessment. We tried to focus in on some of the important things in the signal timing practices area, such as comparative analysis when doing optimizations, are you evaluating different options, as far as timing plans go, selecting the best one? Looking very closely at time space diagrams to see if there are alternate phase sequences that will improve your operations. What are you doing during periods of light traffic flow? Are you flashing signals? Things like that. Last thought, very important measure, are you looking at things such as -- spill back, innovative Northshores to live measures to get a good product out. In the initial assessment there's a bit of feedback, might have been perceived slight between the central and closed loop system, one over the other. We tried, in the new assessment, focus more in on utilizing the capabilities of the system you have more so than do you have this one or that one. Again, there's really no distinction made between the two in the new version, it simply revolves around are you using the features or capabilities of your system. Quick summary. We want to do change the questions, make them more process or outcome oriented. We did need to maintain comparison level with the initial version. We will do this every two years and want to be able to go back and track results, continue to bring emphasis on this area. We wanted to clarify some of the questions, benchmarks, make them easier to understand, make the scoring system easier. Wanted to give you the opportunity, although your specific responses would be anonymous to other jurisdictions you do have the opportunity to share your information with your local federal highway office only, so they can help you with technical assistance or help you procure resources And That's all I have. Thank you, again, for giving emphasis to that box to share information with the federal highway -- one of the functions we do, we can come in, help you with traffic signal operations if you would like us to help you put together a traffic signal program. That's something we do extensively. One thing we do is help to transfer technology, methodology, procedures from one jurisdiction to another. I would encourage you to check that box. Ultimately it helps us benchmark where agencies are in individual states and it definitely will help us assist you better. Our next speaker is Thomas Hicks, he will be discussing a local agency perspective on the survey. Presently the director of traffic and safety for the Maryland state highway administration and one of six officers reporting to the Chief engineer. Responsible for coordinating the work of six divisions, traffic safety analysis, engineering and design, traffic operations, traffic development support, motor carrier and Maryland State Safety office. He's responsible for highway sign and signal shop, served as one of eight members guiding the ITs. program. I am pleased to have the opportunity to present to you today. The perspective from the state D.O .T.s, particularly from Ash to, being the American association of highway and -- officials. Importantly, the ash to directors, three subcommittees, on maintenance, systems management subcommittee. Information that these committees are interested in, of interest to planning committee, standing committee, the three I mentioned, planning, efforts on access management, standing committee on highway traffic safety, and also, believe it or not, the special committee on transportation security, when you consider evacuation routes and the movement of various persons, vehicles under situations of duress. Signals will play I big role in facilitating the movement. The survey, as pointed out, is to address the needs of the total nation. Ashto is o awaiting the results, recognizing more and more the various transportation systems in the state, state highways or local roads or whatever they may be, the public doesn't know the difference between one and the other, it's just one big transportation system. More and more the various programs, state and federal programs, recognize, like the strategic highway safety plan every state has, encompasses all highway systems, and in many cases the state D.O.T.s have a responsibility to lead, coordinate, speer spearhead the charge. The information is of interest to everyone in all the jurisdictions in the state. The manual uniform control devices, put out by the state D.O.T. agencies, has quite a section on signallization, good equipment usage, system, so forth. The state recognizes that the future traffic, both in the U.S. in certain area system going to be somewhat phenomenal, in our state, say over the next 20 years, we expect the vehicle miles travelled to increase some 60%. Yet we know the other capacity providing solutions will not be there to handle this amount of traffic. There will be a lot of traffic management involved and systems play a large role in traffic management. The improvements geometric will be minor in scope. The numbers of signals, as the traffic volumes grow, more signals become warranted. There will be more signals, more of a need to coordinate into a system. The signal phasing will become more complex, the parts of the signals, such as accessible pedestrian signals for visually impaired, that takes available time from the roadways, may create capacity problems, another need to keep the system in fine shape and tune and constantly review to match the changing conditions. You heard who all the partners were. It's important to note that the various organization which have a real sincere interest in this, not the least of which are industry, who are producing the machinery that causes the improvements on the highway. At should point in my talk, I will say research is part of this too. We are looking for new control methods, devices, ways to adapt to traffic control devices, we are not there yet. The purpose of the survey is to heighten awareness of leaders as Marshall and Woody pointed out. There's a lot on the plates of D.O.T. CEOs or mayors or council people. They have a lot of things to do with limited budget resources they have. We are not exactly hiring as many people as we would like to, to do these jobs. We need to bring this to the attention of leaders who will choose what they will do, show this is an important need, has a large pay off and is worthy of extra consideration on their part. As I say, the resources are limited, both dollars, man power. The resources are needed for research, industry needs to be encouraged to do new things, participate more widely. There's a tremendous pay off, every year when we analyze the various traffic control techniques, and other improvements along the highway system, we can see in many cases a modest improvement to the traffic signal operations can result in a rather charge b over c ratio, one of the highest in mobility and safety. Mobility and safety is right at the top of every state D.O.T.'s agenda in their programs. The survey purpose clearly addresses safety and mobility. My bosses here in my state, they want to know how are we responding to these very important transportation elements. You may not think running red lights and high accident statistics can be attributed, but they can. Motorists get frustrated because we fail to do the job we know needs to be done and is readily handy, though we need to advance the state-of-the-art, there's so much we can do right now. Traffic systems management is the large picture, being able to accommodate traffic that's diverted from freeways to arterial routes, it's very important, and therefore a strong planning program is needed where one considers a whole network when considering the overall traffic picture with regard to traffic signals. A third of the signals in the U.S. are not on -- they are local jurisdictions, we want you to report back on this survey and give us the best information you can to answer the questions. As Indicated earlier, the State Department of transportation will play a role in deciding where the resources go, the interest of Ashto is not to grab the dollars, but to have a total program that respects the needs of all jurisdiction . s. The public doesn't know. The D.O.T. responsibilities vary among the states, so for those of you making contacts with the D.O.T. s it could be in traffic engineering, signals isn't in the maintenance area, operations program, could be in planning. Local government, same problem exists, different cities, counties, parts of the government have signals under their control. Coordination across jurisdictional boundaries is essential, Marshall's chart pointed this out. The information, as I say, being gathered by the Ashto standing committees and programs will be developed within ASHTO to address the needs, planning, safety, operational and very personal, the research area as well. It is a select group from those first three committees, traffic engineering, maintenance and systems operations, will be reviewing the survey results. We hoped before the end of winter, but whenever it is, the standing committee, board of direction, expects us to present ideas, recommendations to them. ASHTO will get this out to CEOs, to get resources we need to bring this important program about. That's it, Eddie. Thank you Mr. Hicks. I think, listening to your presentation I can really appreciate what you are saying, and I think, to sum it up, it's really up to us to tell the story of traffic signals, it's up to the traffic signal community to make the case for our needs for our traffic signals. If we don't do that we will continue to be underfunded because there are so many other things on the plate of our stakeholders and leaders. As long as they go red, yellow, green, the perception is they are working fine. Next speaker is Brent Jennings. He started with the Ohio transportation department in August of 1984. During his tenure he served -- Idaho, project engineer, discontradict materials engineer, headquarters office in Boise. Served as associate -- engineer, assistant state construction engineer in the district sic office in eastern 6 in eastern Idaho. Currently serving as safety engineer. Welcome. Thank you very much, and thank you everyone for having me on board to participate today. I think we heard a lot of good information, and so what I want to touch upon, basically, getting down to where we can roll up our sleeves, wanted to touch upon a few things about completing the traffic signal operation self-assessment. As mentioned earlier, this is a very very important document, we think there will be a lot of good information garnered from this that will help us, you might say, be able to bring the cause to those that are the big decision-makers and be able to help as we try to improve our signal systems. There's basically two parts I think everybody needs to consider. Those are really conducting the self assessment and how you go about scoring. Those are the areas I wanted to touch upon. In conducting the self assessment, the document can be -- looks a little thick, but really, keep it as simple and straightforward as you can going forward. Don't make it harder than it needs to remember the self assessment tool is a compilation of best practices of signal operations throughout the United States. Means the self assessment tool doesn't imply all best practices have to be used. That shouldn't be implied by the self assessment process, it's a process to identify tools to put into your improvement box. Also, good to be mindful the self assessment uses initiation s information and knowledge already out there, there's no senior projects lurking out there, not asking agencies or others to participate in any long, drawn-out research type programs. Also, the self assessment really is best conducted, we believe, by a small working group. Here in Idaho we are going to conduct the self assessment with the other district engineers throughout the state and involve the m POs, we have larger counties here in Idaho that tie into the system and will include them as well in this assessment.some suggestions for conducting the self assessment, put together a crew of key players that you think will be positive in the self assessment process. We suggest you provide a self assessment tool in advance of the meeting. We plan to broadcast this out to all participants, have them take a look and be knowledgeable rather than just handing it to them cold in a meeting. We would like to ask participants to score in advance of the meeting so they have a sense of how they would go about, lead to a better discussion when you get to the group. And we plan to consol consolidate the consensus scores into a single document, then you can go out, have a victory lunch at your favorite restaurant. A thing to bear in mind, remember in moof the names of the participants are confidential. Helps to make people feel more comfortable and honest in doing the self assessment. Also, scoring of self assessment, this was brought out earlier, the six areas to touch upon, management, scoring section on signal operation at individual intersections, signal operation and coordinated systems, timing practices, traffic monitoring and data collection and maintenance. Scoring guidance, respondents are going to be asked to rate the extent to which -- adopted or implemented, rating based on individual scores of 1 to 6. A bit of a change, if it's not applicable to you, the response doesn't apply won't be held against you in a final scoring. Finally, each question is followed up by descriptions that illustrate scoring, examples, clarification, no agency, no agency, obviously will have a perfect score. Use some judgment, areas where you may have to exercise judgment to complete. Don't make it more complicated, try to have a little fun along the way. That was brief, Eddie, but about all I had. Thank you Mr. that's it for our speakers today. We are going today, to open the line for questions, want to open the line. If you have a question, please type it in the chat window on the right. I will start to field the questions to our speakers. A couple for you, Marshall, in particular. I will start with the first one. Maybe you see it there, from -- The question is you said 1 percent is spent on signals out of a total highway budget, the figure you had shown needed to operate signals effectively. Well, I am not sure I completely understand the question, but maybe what I said was confusing, because what we were trying to estimate there is an improved level of involvement in signal operations over what is spent today. If we were to spend those aments, adding up to -- would get significant improvements in operations scp safety with the signal system. That one billion represented about one percent of what is spent on the transportation system today, based on federal reports. That's what I should have said if I didn't. It's not that we spend one percent today, spending an additional $1 billion, one percent of current investment would go a along way. Another for you, Mike Patrick. Why do 50% of participants in 2004 survey indicate it would not help get funding, and how can it become modified to better -- help funding? I guess the way the evaluations were structured, I don't know that I can answer why 60% didn't say it would help them. As a past signal practitioner, dealing with councils, city managers, I feel like most traffic engineers feel like it's an uphill battle to ask for more funding when e essentially, in most jurisdictions you are battling against police, fire, parks, other general funded activities. Having additional data that says we're not doing it as well as we should, could help, but not if enough to put them over the top. I think the way to maybe be more effective, get more people on board, thinking they can get more resources, is to have more specific data, if we were to invest half million, hundred, thousand the benefits would be, the specific benefits to our specific. The more specific you get the data aimed at a particular city, county, or corridor, the better you can cell the investment.