Good day, ladies and gentlemen.
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I will turn the presentation over to our host for today, miss Jocyln Bauer.
Good afternoon and welcome to the talking operations web conference reducing congestion, good work zone management strategies that can help.
My name is Jocyln Bauer and I will give a brief introduction into the web conferencing environment
before turning this over to Jerry Warner who we were -- please be advised that today's seminar is being recorded.
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At this point, I would like to introduce, Jerry Warner, the moderator of the intalk talks webcasts.
Jerry serves as the np's ICDN -- intalk talks website.
Jerry has been involved with intelligent transportation system as a consultant and communicator since 1991.
In 1998 he became the editorial director of the intalk talks predecessor website,
its cooperate -- ITS -- in that role he chronicled key strategic -- management operations or MNO arenas and -- MNO leaders visionary policy makers and practitioners.
Prior to starting the ICDN, he founded the popular ITS popular website.
In the early to mid 1990s, Jerry consulted for a leading ITS organizations including ITS America and the University of Minnesota's IST Institute.
He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and prior to joining the field served as director of technology transfer
for a pioneering high-tech research consortium in Austin, Texas I will turn it over to Jerry Warner who will introduce our first speaker.
Thank you very much.
And let's get right to the presentations.
Again, the -- title of our webcast is reducing congestion, good work disabling manage -- management strategies that can help.
Our first presenter is Jacqueline Ghezzi, division of California Department of Transportation.
And her presentation entitled transstation management plans.
Managing congestion and work zones.
Jacqui provides statewide leadership in coordinating the activity of the district track managers and in developing standardized policies and procedures to improve the program.
She develops or modifies statewide policies, procedures and guidelines for the incorporation of transportation management plans, TMP into construction and maintenance activities into California.
A licensed professional engineer in the state of California.
Jacqui received the MS degree in civil engineering from California State University in Sacramento.
In 1983 and MS degree in languages and linguistics from Georgetown University in Washington, DC, in 1975.
She is a current member -- project panel G-03-80, traffic enforcement strategies for work zones.
In 2004, she was a member of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger California's performance review infrastructure team.
Her previous experience with traffic operations at Caltrans District Three in Sacramento
involved the completion of traffic investigations and reports and supervision of congestion and monitoring activities.
Jacqui, you can begin when you ready.
Thank you.
I would like to thank first of all all of you for organizing this effort.
Is that subject that's very, very important to us in California.
And certainly any time we can engender discussion on the subject that's helpful for us as well because we are looking for ways to improve with a we are doing here if California.
We have been doing transportation management plans for about the last 20 years.
We started unofficially doing them in the early '80s.
And the efforts that we did since that time in the very beginning did help us in considerable ways.
But there were still things that we needed to learn.
When we first did our first major TMP, it was for the Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984.
We had projections of huge problems.
Athletes, tourists, media missing the events.
People were so worried about the congestion in L.A. that they decided to move out of town and rent their property to people that were coming in to look at the Olympic events.
We worked with the local agencies and several major firms and enforcement agencies and set up this multidisciplinary team
to come up with several strategies to try to reduce congestion overall before we even laid the Olympic traffic on top of that.
So we had a lot of cooperation from various entities involved on that team.
And we were lucky.
The traffic was not nearly as bad as it had been projected.
We also realized that we needed to do some work in making our TMPs more focused and more systematic.
Several years ago we had legislator that went from Sacramento to the San Francisco Bay area one evening
and he was going along his usual route towards the Napa river bridge and got passed his decision point here
and went all the way down to about five or six miles upstream of the bridge and realized that he had to take a detour and go all the way around to get to his destination.
We found out that night that was a huge problem because there were several people that were in that situation.
There was actually a CMS sign but it was located 12 miles upstream from the bridge.
It hadn't been turned on until the bridge was closed.
That legislator got passed that point before it was turned on.
Then a few nights later, the same legislator went through the same point.
This sign had been activated but wasn't functioning.
Again, the sign was not on.
That legislator went down the same path and we heard about the same problem.
So we had -- this is an example how we were using strategies, trying to notify the public and give them information they needed.
But our process wasn't very well defined.
In California, about five to ten years ago, we were very quickly trying to spend money and doing construction improvements.
Construction was a major priority in California.
It still is, but now we realize that the motorist inconvenience is also a major priority.
And so we worked to try to balance those two.
As you know in California, we have a huge A congestion.
And it's just growing as fast as we can count it.
But we realize that we can't -- we cannot inconvenience the motorists like we used to.
We have to take them into consideration.
And so traffic operations has become a major emphasis at Caltrans in the last few years.
This is probably good timing because the FHWA, as some of you know, is issuing a final rule on works on safety and mobility.
It was actually published last September and will become effective October 12 of the year 2007.
It will affect all state agencies that have transportation projects going on that work in the transportation business.
So I know that Tracy Scribea will follow-up later on to discuss this in detail and I will mention a couple things that I will talk about in this discussion.
The fact that we need to include transportation management plans, TMPs early on in the process, we need to get a lot of players involved.
Not only Caltrans but also local agencies.
The State Police, whoever we use for enforcement.
We need to monitor the work that we do, the strategies that we ice during construction in work zones.
And we need to try to adjust our strategies as we go along through the projects to make sure that we are using the most effective strategy.
So we are hopefully going to be in keeping with what FHWA wants us to do.
And as we go along, we are constantly trying to improve our process.
When we first started our TMP process, we set up positions in each of our 12 districts.
Transportation management, plan manager and a district traffic manager.
And then what we did was we developed transportation management plan guidelines.
And we have tried to keep those guidelines somewhat broad because we deal with urban and rural areas N and congestion characteristics
and try to leave it to each of the 12 districts to develop, to implement the guidelines and cater it to their own conditions.
We have provided a copy, an electronic copy of the TMP guidelines to Jerry Warner and I believe he will post them so they can be downloaded.
As a part of our program, we set up a statewide TMP training program.
It's a intensive program where we brought in not only operations staff but project management, design staff, construction and maintenance crews.
And we have tried to show them why transportation management plans are needed.
What their role is.
What their responsibilities are and how we need to work to implement our strategies and reduce congestion.
We also have transportation management centers that we have set up.
They are regionalized so they cover certain parts of the state and we use those centers as our main communications hub for coordinating all of the aspects of our work zone activities.
This just a rough schematic of what our TMP process is.
As you start on the left, we basically begin the process during conceptual planning and design.
We have a TMP transportation management plan data sheet that the various districts will prepare.
And it depends what type of a project it is.
If it's a small project, for example maintenance activity, a small project or a minor project that's done, a regular activity that's done fairly frequently, then we call it a blanket project.
It's minimal treatment.
If it's a minor project, we proceed directly to preparing a detailed data sheet.
If it's a major project, in other words, we are having a major impact on congestion along the segment that we are working on,
then we might set up a TMP team that will involve operation staff, design, construction, maybe the CHP and maybe even local entities that might need to get involved.
As that TMP team works together throughout the process, they will make sure that everything is developed and implemented as it should be.
One of the main things that we have found out is that it's very difficult to arrange funding for TMP strategies.
We had to convince our project managers that this is something that is very important.
They are trying to control their budgets and keep costs down
and we telling them that you have to include things from monitoring activities and various strategies that they hadn't had to use in the past.
And so we had a real educational process trying to get funding for our various strategies.
And I will explain to you later our training programs so that you can see how they get involved in that.
As we develop the detail plans and specs, we take our TMP information and strategies and include it as part of the big package.
As we move through the design process, as you know, we had some funding problems here in California.
A lot of our projects have been benched.
They have been brought back on-line after maybe three or four or five years.
Those TMPs sometimes have had volumes that were too low and needed to be updated.
We need to make sure that we update the traffic volumes so that our strategy still makes sense.
Then we start implementing the elements that need to be done ahead of times, particularly public information-type strategies, where we try to let the public know what's coming out.
We begin construction through this process of implementing the TMP.
We constantly try to monitor traffic conditions as we go along and hopefully we can adjust the TMP where it's needed.
This -- as a part of our training program, we go through various strategies that we use in our TMPs,
and we try to show the other division of construction and project management design what kinds of things we are looking at.
And it depends on what kinds of projects we are looking at.
If it's a major project we might involve all of these strategies.
Particularly public information.
We had some projects that have had potentially significant impacts on traffic.
So we had to do huge media blitz to let the public know what's going on.
When the public knows what's happening, they can make informed decisions on their own.
That in turn will reduce congestion considerably.
We have other strategies such as motorists information, changeable message signs that we put up to let people know what's happening.
We also have freeway service patrol in certain areas where we will provide free service to people if there are any incidents where they have vehicle break downs or whatever.
And we also try to -- we have a 90 minute rule, a maximum rule for totally clearing accidents that occur on our highways.
And particularly in the vicinity of work zones.
We have various construction strategies that I will talk about later.
There is demand management and alternate route strategies that are somewhat common.
So I won't go into that.
As I said, we have a requirement now that transportation management plans must be done by all districts and they are required for all of the highway activities that we do.
Not just construction but maintenance and -- we divided our projects into blanket, minor projects and major projects.
As you can see, major projects constitute about five percent of the projects we do.
The minor projects are the majority of those projects.
Blanket projects are maintenance type.
We do them off peak.
Very low volume roads.
We don't expect much impact.
If we expect impact we use portable changeable signs.
FSP is freeway service patrol.
And TMP is transportation management teams.
We work in offpeak hours as much as we can.
With minor TMPs, some of the strategies we might use is we would restrict it to night work only.
We would have portable and fixed changeable message signs.
Construction zone enhanced enforcement program.
We use State Police, the California Highway Patrol in our work zones.
They plant themselves right in the work zones and we are looking at alternating that strategy to having them roam around and use other things such as a automated enforcement.
We use transportation management teams.
Highway advisory radio, freeway service patrol and gawk screens.
Some may be familiar with this term.
But when we put concrete barriers in the median when we do construction or anywhere along the highway, we also have started putting up gawk screens which is basically a plywood section
that we put on top of the concrete barrier so that the motorists that are passing by cannot see construction activities going on so they aren't distracted from drive and don't slow down.
Also, it keeps motorists from seeing incidents that may have occurred where vehicles have collided or if they have broken down along the highway.
Our major projects, we often use all of these straightaway that I discussed before.
But in addition, we use public awareness campaigns.
We have public meetings.
We use the media as much as we possibly can.
And sometimes do brochures, billboards and those sort of things.
And we looked at extended closures which I will talk about in a few minutes.
Movable barriers.
Detours, of course.
Reduced lane widths.
Our standard is 12 feet.
But sometimes we reduced that and add an extra lane or use the shoulder where we can.
We also have try to set up websites for major projects and we use helicopter surveillance.
As I mentioned public awareness strategies have become a huge effort.
I think maybe that's because the public is more in tune with what's going on in terms of traffic conditions.
There is more traffic.
There is more use of the internet so they are used to gathering the information on their own.
The public has seen more media coverage recently.
The television stations provide information on congestion limits, travel time, speeds, and incidents along our highways every morning and every afternoon.
So the public is used to looking for that information and that's why we are starting to see that public information is one of the most effective strategies that we use.
On a project that we did in District Four, which is the San Francisco area, we did a public survey to find out what the public noticed the most.
And according to the survey results, they noticed up in newspaper and TV news the most.
We had freeway signs foldout brochures, newspaper ads.
And those were not nearly as effective and fortunately newspaper and TV news are virtually free or almost always free.
That's always something that we have taken into consideration more in our more recent projects.
We also have construction strategies, as I mentioned.
One of the main ones we use is the lane requirement charts.
If our -- in our districts, we have a policy that they cannot accept any more than 30 minutes of delay.
The districts themselves use between zero to 15 minutes of delay per vehicle.
These lane requirement charts are prepared by the district traffic management and TMP management staff.
They use historical volumes and they fill these charts out.
What they do is they tell the contractor exactly how many lanes need to be open at any hour of the day.
According to the district traffic manager, these charts have eliminated about 90% of the potential delay that we were experiencing
before during construction one question that we have had is with more of the night work we are doing now, are we -- compromising quality in anyway or even safety?
There are a few other strategies that we use.
Construction staging.
Delayed penalties we use sometime -- what we do is try to come up with a cost per ten minutes of delays
for the contractors don't try to rent the lane by paying a penalty that's so low it doesn't bother them.
We want to make sure they pick up their closures on time.
We have extended closures we started to use.
Instead of restricting work just to night activities, we are looking at 72 hours during the weekday, maybe 55 hours on the weekend.
We were looking at using shoulders, narrow lane widths, crossover and contingency plans, contractor contingency plans.
Performance measure is a big issue right now that we are trying to build into everything that we do.
And in terms of TMPs, these are the sum of the performance measures that we use.
We do traffic counts.
We watch.
The queue lengths so make sure we don't back up stream of any of the signage we have.
If we do, we make sure the contractor adjusts whatever he has out in the field.
We try to conduct surveys when we can.
These things cost money so we haven't been able to do that as much as we like.
We also have performance measures related to incident management where we try to keep track how long it's taking us to clear incidents.
This is a sample project Southern California which is east of Los Angeles area and this is a project where they will do pavement reconstruction.
And they looked initially at doing the ten hour nighttime closures and came up with something like 2200 hours of closures.
It would have cost about $25 million.
They would have kept very close with 36 minutes they would have kept close to the maximum of 30 minutes that our policy state.
It would have been slightly over, but they would have been close.
They were looking at this as their desired alternative in the beginning.
Then they started looking at other alternatives and found that if they were to do extended closure on the weekend,
they would help the commuters but they would affect the gamblers that travelled to Los Angeles on the weekends.
72 hour weekdays was not a popular alternative because it affected the commuters.
And they would have been looking at 75 minute delays.
Now you see we have circled this alternative here and surprisingly enough this alternative ended up being the one that they picked.
This was -- they had continuous closures, one on each side of the highway.
24 hour days, seven days a week and what they did was they did a huge media blitz before this occurred.
Did surveys with the public, and I will show you that in a second.
But they ended up with more -- they didn't get the 196 that we show here.
But they did end up with more than 30 minutes delay, $17 million or about $16 million.
But the public was happy because they were able to complete the construction in one month instead of eight months.
They were able to put down concrete that would last 30 years instead of 15.
This was a huge change in perspective and I will show you here.
They did some public surveys in the beginning here on the right.
You can see that 64% of the people preferred nighttime or weekend work which would have taken eight months.
There were others that about 7% wanted a continuous project, nonstop.
And this was before the project started.
After the project was done, this was the reaction.
They asked if the public approved the approach of having a continuous construction period.
And 69% were in favor of it during construction.
75% after versus the 7% before.
The delays that were experienced, about half of the people experienced between zero and 30 minutes delay.
And about 47% experienced delays of 30 to more than.
Zero minutes.
Wasn't the 190 minutes but they did have considerable delays and people were still interested in using that same approach on future projects.
Now I'm -- I'm almost running out of time to sum up a couple of points here.
We have run a few lessons.
The low cost public awareness strategies seem to work very, very well.
Advanced signage is very effective.
But we have to make sure that we put the signs up ahead of time and they are upstream of the decision points.
If we have two routes coming in to one, we have to make sure to put signs on both routes.
And on major projects, we try to test out the response by the public to whatever strategies we have used on preceding weeks or weekends.
The lane requirement charts that I talked about, we try to make sure that we update those volumes so that they reflect current conditions.
And we implemented a new lane closure system that I won't go into here.
That system is used by the district statewide and helps us to provide realtime conditions so that everybody knows what's happening at every minute.
Works 24/7.
And can be used by staff and also the contractors can become users in this system and can use it on any computer anywhere in the world.
It's working well right now.
We have the philosophy now that we try to keep the lanes open as much as possible with the strategies that I have mentioned before.
And as I said, we are looking at extended closures more than in the past.
And basically, I think even in Europe they are finding out that people would prefer that we get in, stay in and then get out and not come back for quite a long time.
We try to make sure that we monitor activities during construction and debrief our project engineers to find out what worked and what didn't.
And just in summary, as I mentioned, TMP is effective.
It has helped us to show people their roles so they work better together.
We try to make sure to update our traffic volumes.
One thing I wanted to mention is that we have one highway where we put in a brand-new shopping mall on a connecting highway
and that changed our condition significantly and we had to revamp our strategies during construction because of that.
We try to streamline the process.
Most of the projects can be taken care of with just a standardized form.
Major projects we have a more detailed treatment and we have to make sure to include money for monitoring.
There are strategies that we use for counting the volumes, not only in the main segment, but also on the detours to make sure we don't affect people on detours more than we want to.
I just put in a couple of pieces of information.
These are samples you at the companies for various strategies that we have that you will be.
Some of these can be costly.
So we are trying to do an inhouse effectiveness study to see what's working and what isn't and put our money where it works the best.
Here is the sample TMP data sheet that I mentioned.
And this done basically during concept -- con -- conceptual design, during preliminary plans and planning staging.
As we proceed through the process of designing the project and these strategies are more detailed or modifies or however they need to be.
Is that sample of a calculation curve to show how we calculate what the delay might be.
This developed by a gentleman that worked for Caltrans called Adolph Moskowitz,
with this -- this graph, you can determine here this vertical distance between this lower line is the capacity, so for two lanes it would be 3000 per hour.
And this up here is the actual volumes that pass through the construction area.
This vertical difference is the number of volumes that you would find in the D view.
The horizontal difference is the delay in minutes per vehicle.
If you were to carry these two lines out so that they met, if you went from 5:00 A.M. until the time that those two guides meet that will give you the duration of the congestion period.
So that's just something to show you that -- how we calculate delay in the various districts.
And that is it.
I think we are supposed to save questions for later.
I will turn it back to Jerry.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Jacqui.
Very interesting.
And thank you for sharing Caltrans considerable experience in planning for and managing construction work zones.
Quite interesting to compare notes with your experience and ODOT's experiences.
Dave Holstein will explain in our next presentation.
Our second presenter is Dave Holstein whose state traffic engineer for the Ohio department of transportation.
In the insightful his presentation, work zone crash analysis and traffic management and work zones.
Out did the MOT process.
Dave Holstein.
Dave's office is responsible for policy maintenance and construction and operations -- traffic signals, highway lighting, work zones, signing, deliniation,
ITS and standard's Ohio passed a six-cent gas tax and in the first couple years of the largest construction program in its history.
Many of the projects will be reconstruction and capacity expansion of Ohio's urban interstate systems.
Ohio has a fourth largest interstate system.
Fifth largest volume of traffic and third largest of trucks in the U.S.
Rebuilding and expanding interstate systems in these conditions will present challenges.
In response to the challenges, Ohio has developed processes to identify potential traffic maintenance problems easterly in the planning stages of each project.
It's Ohio's goal to overcome the problems where feasible and where it is not feasible to limit
the A time those problems are present through the use of innovative contracting and construction techniques.
Okay, Dave, you can begin when you are ready.
Thank you for having me talk, I appreciate it.
It all started out with our director.
We are embarking on one of the largest programs in our hiss reach.
The director was concerned about the impact our work zones were having.
Specifically most recently about crashes.
So we started taking a detailed look at our work zones or to see what the effects we were having on crashes.
Well, my first knee jerk reaction was when he asked this was, yes, of course, we don't have smooth pavement.
Smooth pavement or clear zone like we do.
My first knee jerk reaction, yes, there are problems being caused by work zones.
Probably not a lot we can do about it.
But after we started looking into things, turns out there was some things we could do better.
The basically the process for determining the crash impacts of our work zones was to do before and after studies of major interstate work zones.
We had analyzed the crashes during construction and if it was a two year work zone we looked at the two year period before that and compared crash rate.
The particular slide was for 2003 construction season.
You can see that with the work zone, we had a crash rate of 2.02.
Without it 1.19.
That was way too high of an increase.
Similarly for 2002, we had a 1.68 versus a 1.04 prior to the construction being in place.
Next step was, okay, let's find out what's causing this.
So we literally hand logged thousands of crashes and looked for high concentrations and then went back to see what was going on.
The first problem we had was geometrics, large, large concentrations of crashes centered around our ramps, specifically the ramp merges.
We were constructing ramp merges that were too short.
Didn't provide adequate decision site distance.
The other was offering up capacity.
Later I will talk about our work zone policy and its design to ensure we provide sufficient mainline capacity.
We failed to look at off-ramp capacity.
Specifically, like at a system's interchange like a two lane off-ramp we were taking it down to one lane and that would cause traffic to backup on the interstate and a lot of crashes.
The third point, point C, was insufficient paved shoulders patch lot of our rural work zones, interstate work zones, the only thing we could think of is our districts
were trying to save money but shifting traffic over on to the shoulder and instead of putting more temporary pavement to provide a paved shoulder, we were providing an aggravate shoulder.
We can't hold berming material prior to a work zone we were causing a lot of dropoff problems and crashes.
The second big problem we noticed was speed.
And most people around the country will recognize it as a problem.
But through some speed studies, we were averaging in 2004 last year 11 miles per hour higher than the posted speed limbs of our work zones.
So the geometric problems.
The ramp we constructed had new standards.
Now part of the design process the consultants are required to design in the ramp merges in the work zones.
Now we created a desired cross section that -- where possible.
And now off-ramp capacity which was the third geometric problem was looked at as part of our traffic alternative analysis that I will talk about later.
That wraps up the part about our crash analysis.
If any of you are DOT people, you don't have standards for on ramp merges in your work zones, you need to look at that.
Okay, the second part of our director's concern was capacity.
So to address that we come up with three different things here.
We developed a traffic policy in 2000.
That's where we proactively redefined of our work zones will be.
Secondly, and more recently we developed the main traffic terms analysis.
This used to look for a predefined list of constraints or problems that a work zone might have.
Again, we consider this a proactive both the work zone policy and the maintenance traffic alternative analysis actually take place in the preliminary engineering basis of the project.
These are occurring before the detailed plans drawn up by the consultant.
The reason for that is that we formally looked at means of traffic as a designed detail.
The problem with that is if you discover a constraint or problem, a lot of times it's too late to do anything about it.
Bridges are designed.
You can't afford to go and buy right-of-way at that point without delaying the project.
Or impact the environmental impact.
Our goal is to identify changes up front and early before the design so we can engineer end fixes without having to go back and rework plans.
Thirdly and again, actually the work zone crashes, I will go into later.
This suspect the anele -- this isn't the analysis.
This is where we are looking at crashes in our work zone and pretty close to realtime.
This slide is a representation of ODOT's planning development process.
It's a very well defined 14 steps for major projects.
In step six, our policy kicks in and step seven and stage one design of step eight.
Is that graphic showing that we are trying to address and address the work zone problems before we get the detailed design.
Our maintenance traffic policy.
It was created back in 2000.
And the corner stove the whole thing is similar to California is we have permitted lane closure time for every link.
It defines when we can reduce the number of lanes.
So if we have a two lane directional freeway, it tells me we can go to one.
If it's a four lane, you can go to three when you can go to two.
The policy allowed maximum thresholds.
We chose to use queue length because we want our construction people to report where there are problems.
And we weren't sure how well they would be able to estimate delay in the field.
But we thought they could intuitively look at a queue and see if it violates the allowable thresholds
and it set up a detailed analysis for analyzing the impacts and the policy applies to construction and hand maintenance work.
So in Ohio there is a lot of night work.
It's not have I virtue we made it policy statement everyone will do nightwork.
The a product of the permanent lane closures.
A lot of time for you to get out to crack, seal or paint or do the maintenance projects is at night.
Our permitted lane closure is really driving the nighttime work in Ohio.
This kind of the flow chart.
Starting in the upper left at the start, of the first question is, will it violate the permitted lane closure times.
If the answer is no, the district is done with the maintenance traffic policy.
They are free to design it and construct it.
If it will violate the times, that's when they do the detailed analysis.
It is possible to violate the permitted lane closure times.
However, when you do the analysis, as long as you don't violate the allowable key thresholds, you are fine to go on and design and construct.
If, however, the project will produce queues in violations of what's allowed, the district has two choices.
They either figure out a way to sequence the construction, or come up with other means to not violate the lane closure time
or ask for an exception request from the traffic exception committee so this is the first part.
Will it violate 9 permitted lane closure times.
Here is what it's like.
It's a web based application.
I will give you a blowup.
Here is a blowup.
This particular one, it's probably hard to read.
But the site on the left tells when you can go from three lanes to two.
And then the color area on the right shows when it's three lanes to one.
The orange areas are times that you cannot do a lane reduction.
There are four columns that's weekday and weekend for both the construction season and nonconstruction season.
There are four columns.
Perform the analysis.
They have a project.
It will provide the permitted lane closure times.
They can do the analysis to still meet the policy.
Based on queues '98 and what we developed through research and then there is also third component in ODOT's spreadsheet, threat working together provides the expected queue lengths.
If you know it predicts queues greater than the threshold and here are the thresholds, I won't read them to you.
But basically what it boils down to in an urban area with a lot of traffic, we were not going to reduce the number of lane for work zone.
It allowed for here, but the reality of it is in an urban area, we just provide the same number of lanes.
If for some reason it is cost pro hadn'ttive, for instance, if we have to widen 4,000-foot long bridge to maintain the number of lanes, district feels it is just completely not cost beneficial.
They can commit a exception request.
The means of traffic exception committee is made up of our assistant director and my boss.
It's at a high level because if they decide to spend an extra $4 million on project to maintain traffic,
that will impact the program and we won't pave a road somewhere else and we won't build a bridge somewhere else.
It's made the decision at a executive level.
They are presented with multiple alternatives to choose from.
All of them show the impact construction cost to the motoring cost and things like that.
The required proposed mitigation strategies and any of those can be ITS, web cams and a lots of the things you heard about.
But the bottom line -- and this takes an organizational commitment very few exceptions are granted.
We are spending a ton of money to maintain traffic.
That's our policy.
As you recall from the wheel slide, the policy occurs -- and I will explain why.
That is the study we were looking for a predefined set of problems.
We give the consultant a footprint to look at.
We tell them how many number of lanes they need and the permitted lane closure.
The desired footprint that we talked about earlier with the lane with minimum lane width.
Shoulders and error outsets and things like that.
What we do then is tell the consultant to -- back to the wheel.
We tell the consultant to overlay them in specific locations and we wanted to do it from our cross over and apart with the scenario and the consultant reports back,
with this cross section and these locks and those are between interchanges and merge points and merge point on all of the bridges and also restrictions,
like if we have -- in the median, they lay that cross section in and report back -- explicitly on these things in the screen.
This is an example of one of the tables -- this a pretty simple project.
Can get very complicated for a big project.
Also, part of the alternative analysis you can see on the right kind of a schematic on the number of lanes and where the cross sections are.
And on the left are the actual cross sections.
We use those to get information ourselves about the constraints that they are reporting.
-- also there is a process we use internally to make sure we don't repeat the mistakes of the past.
This geometric problems I spoke about.
Remember the crash geometric stuff and let's make sure it doesn't happen again.
There they are again in case you forgot.
Before guy on, I want to talk about a couple more things about the traffic alternatives analysis.
It's not explicitly discussed in the slide show.
We are using it for other things.
As we go through the plan development process, we start with numerous alternatives that we are looking at.
Geometrics and put CD roads where the interchanges will go and things like that.
And this goes through prothesis.
The number of alternatives in there is down to eventually gets down to one.
Well, when we have two or three alternatives is when we do the means of traffic alternatives analysis and we do it for all of the potential alternatives that might get built
and the idea is you may have an alternative that after it's built from a capacity and operation standpoint will work very well, but it's impossible to maintain traffic during construction.
Well, the maintenance traffic alternatives analysis will point out that fatal flaw
and will eliminate that alternative from moving forward and being the preferred alternative that will be designed and built.
So again we are affecting design decisions in what alternatives that will be designed or built once the project is constructed.
This goes back to our director's concern.
We did have what we call hot spots, concentrations of crashes.
We started actively working to get works and crash reports in near realtime as possible.
At first we tried to get the contractor to get them from enforcement.
And that was a miserable failure.
Then we tried to get law enforcement to fax them to us and then it was marginally better but it was failure.
But now every year, we are doing it right now, we were picking out the big work zones that we will get crash reports for.
And I send out of my office twice a month a group of people to go around to the local law enforcement agencies to pick up the crash reports.
So we pick them up twice a month.
It's not realtime but as close to realtime as practically we can manage.
The crashes are put into a database and then we have a nice little application that sorts them and into half mile segment's this the output of the application.
You can see purple bars.
Those are the number of work zone crashes in that half mile segment.
The red lines is the historical frequencies of crashes in that half mile section before the project started.
So we to establish the red line, we look at the three years previous to it.
And then take the average number of crashes that occurred in that half mile section and that establishes that red line, kind of the base.
Now, when we put a project in and we start seeing the purple line move up quickly toward that threshold, that's an indication we have a problem.
And it's worse when we surpass it.
What that will result in is we will go out in the field and we will find a problem and we will write change orders and make effects.
So other topics, we do inspect, and a lot of other state dozen this, too, we inspect out of central office every interstate twice a year looking for safety problems.
The districts are evaluated on how well they adhere to the standards.
And each director is held accountable to make sure their work zones are safe and to the standards.
We were now in the middle of our largest internal training program.
2,500 highway workers, project inspectors, people like that, who required to take a series of classes in certification.
One of them is work zone setup.
We were now requiring that all consultants who want to be prequalified with ODOT to attend a freeway work zone design and there is testing and certification part of that.
One strategy that we are starting to use quite a bit, that get in and get out philosophy, is complete closures.
Particularly for bridge overlays.
We found that we can do up to 23,000 square-foot deck, close it Friday night and open it up Monday morning using hydro demolition and quick set concrete.
You have to be careful of blow throughs because it will screw up your schedule.
We started looking for ground penetrating radar to find those areas.
And then questions will be later.
Thank you very much.
Dave.
Very interesting stuff.
And I'm pleased to see we had a lot of excellent questions in the chat area.
If you think of one, be sure to type it in.
We had a nice dialogue on flagging.
I think we had a threat of about six messages talking to each other -- a thread.
That's an excellent sign.
Our third presenter is Tracy Scriba who is a specialist and the title of her presentation is the final rule on work zone safety and mobility.
Tracy is a key member of the HD and safety team.
She is leading the efforts for outreach and support implementation of the recently published work zone safety mobility work that our earlier speakers referred to.
She is also responsible for a number of other FHWA work zone areas, including those related to best practices, performance measures, the use of clashes and ITS and work zones.
Tracy holds a systems engineering degree from the university of Virginia.
And, Tracy, you can begin when you are ready.
I don't see the slide up there yet.
I'm sure it's coming momentarily.
It looks like it should be up there.
Jerry, I don't see Tracy listed in the panelist box.
she wouldn't be.
She would be under Jocyln, Dave, are you seeing slides?
No it's still on my last slide.
While we try it get that up there, I will talk about the recently published works on safety mobility rule today.
Before I get into the rule, I want to put it in contact and the context of our effort here at federal highway.
Because of the overall goal of our work zone program here is the catch phrase that many have heard, to make work zones work better.
To look to ways that can reduce congestion and crashes due to work zones.
We look at the rule as one tool, if you will, for making work zones work better.
So kind of in line with the tight of -- title of today's session that will can reduce congestion in and around work zones.
And Dave and Jackie gave great examples of how to do this.
Yeah, we are in good shape.
These are the topics I will go through today, just the way the presentation is organized.
Kind of starting out with a little more background.
Why did we update the rule?
It started out as a legislative requirement that congress required the federal highway to review current work zone problems
and update the regulation to better reflect what are the current needs for safety and to minimize disruption to traffic during construction highway projects.
So we are told to update the regulation.
That's how it started out.
We also believe that it -- as we got into it, it made sense to update it.
That it can really help make work zones work better as I mentioned earlier.
There are a lot of real issues out there with work zones.
We heard some mention of that today.
We are seeing growing traffic volumes and congestion on our roads without work zones that create challenges to adding any other disruptions to that.
We see a lot of our highways approaching middle age and so that means more construction and repair are needed
and that leads to more work zones and that means that more of those work zones are on roads that are carrying traffic.
That creates additional concern for managing congestion as well as safety issues that are caused by working on roads that we are still trying to put traffic through.
As I mentioned, safety also, that continues to be a concern.
We have seen a growing trend in fatalities in the recent years.
That at least in part is probably tribute to more work but we can't say for sure.
In fact, the only factor that regardless of those fatalities are a concern.
And then lastly, this was alluded to.
Travelers are not happy with work zones.
We can't ignore that fact at this point.
It's just become more of an issue.
And in some surveys that federal highway has done, the American public cited work zones second only to poor traffic flow in causing dissatisfaction.
It's on the radar screen of the public.
Our customers.
So we hope that this rule serves as a tool to helping address these issues and reducing congestion and crashes in work zones.
Just to briefly mention, this the main point of this slide is to show the development of this rile was done with careful consideration.
As you can see it's over a two and a half year period.
It was not something done quickly.
And we solicited input in a formal way three times through an advance notice of proposed rule making.
Notice proposal and a supplemental notice.
So we really took a lot of input into -- and careful consideration in deciding what the rule should look like to try to meet the overall goals.
As Jacqui mentioned, it was published in September.
And all state and local governments received federal aid funding are required to comply with the provisions of the rule by October 12, 2007.
What were the goals doing this?
You can look at it and then within the frame of the three items mentioned here, basically to make work zones work better by expanding thinking beyond actual work zone itself.
Recognizing that there are work zone is part of a larger transportation network.
There are corridor and regional issues that need to be addressed.
Coordination that needs to happen to manage traffic appropriately in the area where a work zone is.
That we are looking to expand work zone management beyond traffic safety and control.
The previous regulation was more focused on traffic control plans and more from a safety perspective.
We have more mobility issues that we have now and that need for customer focus project development.
So we also need to provide for that sustained operations and management of the work zone and the whole area impacted by the work zone.
That could entail using strategies like ITS to monitor and manage traffic, incident management plan for the work zones.
As well as keeping the public informed.
As has been mentioned also today.
So the greater consideration work zone impacts that's fostered by the rule should lead to -- congestion.
There are a lot of great solutions out there that just don't necessarily need to be created but need to be implemented more from using the full road closures that have been mentioned.
Looking at longer life material's prefabricated materials.
Structures, things like that that can help move forward and improving work zones.
Get a little more specific here, these are some the areas of the rule addresses.
Looking at institutionalizing planning, design and operational strategies that help reduce congestion and crashes due to work zones.
I think we are all aware of with the changes face of our public agencies, we have a higher rate of turnover to do what had been traditionally more in-house work.
We need more processes and practices institutionalized and that's reflected in the work zone policy component of the rule.
And also to advocate a move of partnership.
Private owners, contractors, all those that would be involved in putting the project out there and work together to do it the best way possible.
To improve public communication, outreach work zones.
I mentioned this as this could possibly be the biggest bang for the buck in improving effective work zone transportation management.
And Jackie mentioned this in her presentation and what they found in California.
If we give the traveler good information, it can help them make better travel decisions.
That's kind of an element there.
And also not specifically said in the slide but look fog operational solutions such as adjusting signal time and using ITS that I mentioned earlier.
And then work zone considerations as early as possible and project delivery.
I will touch on that.
And considering the fact that there are different project types and classes.
That not -- there is not a one size fits all.
What's appropriate for one project and might not be appropriate for another one to emphasize the importance of training
as I mentioned a little while ago they are changing the staffs our agencies, turnover and all that, there is a need even more so for proper training.
And to emphasize the need for performance monitoring and assessment.
If you don't measure something and don't look at that time that way, you don't know how well it's performing.
Those are kind of the -- you can almost call them the principles of the rule that are hoping to bring forth.
This slide is trying to give a -- kind of an overview of how the rule is organized.
It's organized into three primarily components.
Development implementation of an overall state based work zone safety policy.
Development of standard processes and procedures.
That will help implement the policy and development.
Project level procedures.
The policy of the state develops and implements will guide and influence its processes and procedures
and will in turn guide what the state does at the project level and that's what the diagram is indicating.
And as in turn the agency sees how certain project level efforts work in the field, at the bottom level there,
hopefully that information can be used over time to refine its work zone policy and higher level processes and procedures.
Dave talked a bit about the crash analysis in Ohio and with the merge area issue
and what they discovered looking at one project said back up the line to looking at what they are doing across the statewide basis.
That is an example of discovery on one level that might feedback up the line.
The next part of the presentation focus on how the pro visions relate to what is the provisions relate to is the general process.
How these are fitting in the process and acknowledgement of the states are doing some aspic of what's in the rule already
and the intent isn't to redo the whole project delivery process but to bring out some items during the project delivery process that's there.
This next diagram is basically a simplistic illustration of the project delivery cycle.
Each box indicates a process and arrows that would indicate flow there.
And the policy and standard procedures box is shown as it is because these items should influence many if not all of the project delivery processes.
That's the point of that slide.
Just to show that.
So to get more specific, the policy aspect of the rule, and this really the heart of the rule, the development and implementation of an overall state level on safety mobility policy.
We look at the policy as being necessary really to support systematic work zone impacts across the different stages of project development
and address the mobility and safety needs of those who use the road and those who do the work on the road.
So the intent is with a policy is to help states institutionalize their planning, design and operational strategies to help reduce the crashes in work zones.
The state is the action office when it comes to policy and the rule provides some direction on areas the state would address in the policy but the specifics are left up to them.
And we do basically acknowledge in the rule that the policy might take them any of a -- several different forms.
Might be processes, procedures or guidance.
We acknowledge that some states have a problem with the term policy.
Whether it's due to state law or other governing factors, there is a language in the rule that would allow that policy to take a number of different formats.
But no matter what format it takes or what it's called, it's still the state's guiding document on work zone management for federal aid highway projects.
Next layer down in that diagram I showed earlier with the three boxes is the standard procedures area.
This provision of the rule addresses the development of standard processes and procedures and those kind of encompass several areas,
the areas on the slide, assessing and managing work zone impacts in a systematic way.
Using safety and operational data.
Requiring training and conducting process reviews.
With the safety and operational data, the intent there is to kind of on two levels.
To use available project date taw and information both to manage impacts during implementation of projects and to overtime look at data from multiple project and use that to improve.
As I mentioned earlier, gave the example that Dave mentioned about the merge areas,
that can be one example of looking at data and using it both in the current project as in overtime to make overall improvements pp and then requiring training.
Appropriate the job responsibilities and decisions.
Dave made references of training efforts there.
Looking at how what else we need to do in that area and then overall conducting process reviews every two years.
To make overall improvements.
The other box, the lower level box on that slide looks at project level procedures.
The main components of this aspect of the rule are to identify significant projects which in a simple way of putting it are those projects that are expected to cause a greater level of impacts.
This is intended to help agencies allocate resources more effectively
by identifying the projects early in the development process that are likely to most benefit from congestion management strategies and other strategies.
And then that would flow into developing a transportation management plan for projects that is measured with a expected impacts of the project.
What the impacts are estimated to be.
And then from that, the TMP provisions would be included in the plan specifics for projects.
This includes appropriate pay item provisions for implementing the TMP.
It could be unit payee time -- item or lump sum items.
And then monitor the T -- items.
There could be adjustments made during implementation.
Putting those little into the project development process, as I mentioned earlier,
during the systems planning stain is when we would envision the significant projects, at least from preliminary identification of that would need to happen.
Basically addressing the issues requires that earlier consideration but also that would continue through the project development cycle.
As was mentioned earlier, if you don't look at some of these issue early on, you may not have the resources as you get further down the road or the openings available to make adjustments.
The need to identify the possibilities early on.
The rule defines a significant project in a way that is quite a mouthful.
I will just mention it here briefly.
Well, it's hard to say it briefly.
It's a significant project is one that a alone or in combination with other projects nearby
is anticipated to cause sustained work zone impacts that are greater than what is -- based on state policy and or engineering judgment.
And the reason that is a mouthful is that it's intended to provide flexibility to the state in that determination.
There is a minimum Barnett rule for certain projects, interstate projects, in the transportation management area
that will be out there for a certain period of time that are at a minimum a significant project exception.
There is a exception possibility for that.
The preliminary engineering investigation.
This the stage where the project is further defined and the impact of the work will have greater clarity.
This stage may be in the NEFA process.
As mentioned, it's critical to identify the work and mitigation strategies that will involve significant resources at this stage.
And Dave made in his presentation it needs to be done before it is too late and Jacqui mentioned the challenge of funding.
There is also any other coordination issues such as utilities and special events in the community that might be identified in this point.
And then during the design, PS and E and contracting stage, this is where the concrete decisions are made that will influence the ultimate shape, duration, the operation of the work zone.
So taking the earlier plan and programming information combining it with preliminary investigation engineering
will facilitate effective work zone mitigation strategy and development in the final design phase.
And then developing the appropriate TMP.
That's basically a TMP consists of strategies to manage the work zone impact of a project.
So its scope and its degree of detail will vary based on the state's work zone policy and the state's understand what impacts are anticipated for a project.
For significant project, the TMP needs a temporary traffic control plan as well as some elements of transportation operations and public information components.
For all projects, even those that are less than significant, the TMP may consistently leave it traffic control plan.
However, the hope is that states will look at transportation operations and public information strategies for all of their projects as appropriate.
And just to briefly, some examples of transportation operational strategies might include travel demand management.
Use of ITS, speed enforcement, traffic incident management, things like that.
And public information -- that might be pretrip or en route whether it's via website or via electronic message signs along the roadway.
Flyers sent ahead of time to let the public know about projects.
various different strategies that can be used.
And we found that some people are may is asked when the problem would happen when a project started never materialized because of a good public information campaign.
That's true with some full closure projects.
That is really an effective way of getting an impact.
Resolved.
Or at least lessened.
And the construction stage, the TMP is implemented.
How well it's working should be monitor asked adjustments made as needed.
Maybe long queues are form and adjustments to lane closure types might be needed.
Something like that.
As I mentioned it could affect the current project and lead to adjustments back to the state's policies.
Wars this will be done in sustained consultation with any stake holders in the transportation agencies.
Freight movers, et cetera.
That might be affected by the project and be involved with helping with the solution.
The last step is the performance assessment area.
The rule states that states shall use field observation available work zone crash data and operational information to manage work zone impacts
for specific projects during implementation and the state shall continue to improve the mobility by analyzing work zone crashing and -- for multiple data to include their processes and procedures.
And alluded to this several times so I won't spend time on it now.
But the idea is to really use what we learned along the way to make improvements in the future.
This is essentially a summary what I covered.
These are essentially reiteration of the points from earlier.
I will close out with just a little bit of a mention of some of our outreach and implementation guidance related to the rule.
The rule is initially not published of that in September and outreach efforts began at that point in time.
We held web conferences with our FHWA field offices so they can be brought up to speed.
The rule as in initial starting point in assist headquarters over time with some the outreach.
And those efforts will continue over the next couple of years as the role of implementation accelerates.
In corporation with the annual meeting and ARPA meeting this year in the fall we held policy workshops
to gain insights to what the different practitioners might see the needs, things that will help to implement the rule.
And other out reach efforts include development of print material such as fact sheets and brochures and publishing articles and getting presentations at conferences and web conferences like this one.
And all this information that we develop will be loaded to our website after it is available.
This just shows you that we do have a brochure out and a series of fact sheets pp one covers the overall rule
and the other three introduce the guidance documents that will be available and that's the idea with the fact sheets so that there is awareness that these things are in the works.
The implementation guidance will cover basically four different areas.
One is the -- guide, which basically those over the -- all the aspects of the rule to some degree explains the content and intent of the rule
and provides information for -- for examples and resources to go to things like that is what it will be covered in the implementation guide.
The other three, the first three on the list are more specific guidance documents that they look at some the elements of the rule.
Doing an impact assessment for work zone.
Developing a transportation management plan and doing a public information out reach strategy.
These documents will provide ideas for implementing these aspects of the rule as well as examples and resources for more information.
We hope to include a lot of examples like the ones we heard earlier today about -- in these guidance documents.
At the bottom, in addition to implementation guidance, there are other elements happening that we hope will also support implementation of the rule.
New NHI course on advanced work zone management design and that's going to build on the existing courses that focus more on traffic control practices.
They will cover more across the spectrum of planning, design, contracting issues, things like that.
Techniques in those areas.
It should be available this summer.
Other tools on the bottom, most have available, like the night work applications have been documented and NCHRP research.
Law enforcement is under development for training.
And these items, there is more information on our website.
And then this is a last on the status.
The fact sheets in the brochure are now available and are loaded to our website shortly.
We did pass them out at TRB for anyone who was there.
But we will have electronic version shortly.
And the rule guidance that we plan to have later this year.
The last slide has our website.
And that has been covered otherwise.
So I will leave it at that.
Thank you very much.
That's lot of information and appreciate you highlighting the key items of new work zone final rule.
And also like to thank our other two presenters today for some excellent presentations.
I think it's evidenced by the great number of questions that we had posted in the chat area.
Before we go to the Q and A session, that we put information on the website.
It links to -- it includes links to other website mega sites and resources.
You can see the address here.
I want to point out that the last part of the WZ underscore websites.PHP.
You can't quite tell because it's underscores.
I encourage you to write down the website address.
And we will post a newsletter today.
There are a lot of good restores here.
National work zone presentation clearing house.
Tracy talked about the various resources on the site.
And we link to three really good guide books that share lessons learned.
Next I would like to get to the questions and answers and I think we will start out talking about flowers.
We had the first posting and five responses to it.
Having to do with issues that person had we had much discussion recently regarding the safety of a flagger just behind a paver.
The escape route or lack there of.
And wanted to know the thoughts on that.
Do any of our presenters want to dive into that topic?
I saw someone had mentioned that they use enforcement officers.
We -- I believe that we use flaggers behind the pavement.
I can't say positively.
I know as a part of our proceeds process we have the state troopers and officers in place.
Dave, any experience from Ohio on that?
On the issue of flagger applications?
Uh-huh.
Well, we typically use flaggers for a lot of our two-lane operations and it's really just same application you would find in the national manual.
We don't use law enforcement for flags other than potentially at an intersection.
Sometimes we will use a police officer in a patrol car there.
Is safety been a continuing issue.
Have you done anything specific for that?
For flagging?
Yeah.
Nothing beyond what the normal standards are, no.
The high visibility and all that stuff.
The high visibility of peril, but beyond that, no.
We are waiting to see I guess the RC flagman was granted interim approval from federal highway.
We were waiting to sea how that happens and may be interested in exploring that.
Other than that, nothing special.
Jacqui, you mentioned cozy and one of our presents asked for more information on it.
Why don't you start out by saying again what the acronym stands for and then go into it in a little more detail.
Construction zone enhanced enforcement program.
And we do most of our work at night.
Night time operations we try to have State Police present in their vehicles and they usually park right at the upstream end of the work zone
it depends on who the project manager and what district, they use them differently in different districts.
Some of them have the officers roam occasionally and issue tickets to violators.
But right now most of them I think are parked in the work zone.
Initially, this effort was started because in the Los Angeles area we had people that were harassing the workers in the work zone.
That's why we put State Police there.
Now it's not only protection of the workers but also the motorists.
We are starting to look at having them roam more to make sure that people don't violate speeds through the work zone.
Thank you.
Jerry, we do -- every year we contract with the highway patrol and local police agencies for increased enforcement in our work zones as well.
We are setting it up right now for this year.
And we use safety money to pay for that.
Okay, thanks.
Tracy, let me get to one kind of an interesting question that ties all three presentations.
The questioner asks that it sounds like California and Ohio are well along in this process of conforming with the final rule.
Would you say they in compliant now?
If not, what more will they need to comply with?
I have to give you I guess accurate answer would be to say that I can't say if they are in compliance now.
That's a tough question.
Yeah, because it's going to be a function of the division offices to be working with the states on compliance.
So that -- there will be an active role of the division office in determining that as well as I'm familiar with some the stuff that was presented today and what California and Ohio were doing.
I can't say I am familiar with the entire program.
So there may be other areas that have more of a ways to go than these particular areas.
We have in the couple of different venues in addition to this one, looked at California and Ohio for some examples because they are doing some neat things.
But that's by no means to say they are the only states that are doing some neat things that will fit in well with the rule.
There are certainly a lot of other states doing elements as well.
I can't give you a specific on to whether they are in compliance or not.
I will say they are doing a number of things that support being in compliance with the rule.
Tracy, do you know if the local division offices will work with the DOT in deciding that issue?
Think as far as some discussions on that and educational process, I think that can start any time.
It's not -- there is not a set date when that will start.
So hopefully that can be going on now or beginning now to happen.
I think there will be some -- one of the reasons we are pushing to get the guidance documents out by the fall of this year
is also so that that will be available for everyone to take into mind as they move toward looking at how to implement the rules.
My it can happen at any time.
My guess is that there will also be some greater confidence as these guidance documents develop to step up that discussion.
But I would certainly hope it will be going on even now.
Okay.
Let me get to question for Jacqui.
The question was, do you have specific -- guidelines or requirement for incorporating incident management in the TMP.
And Dave, you might want to touch on that from your point of view.
Incident management strategies are actually in operation at all times.
They are not necessarily strategies that we would put into any specific TMP unless we need additional, for example, freeway service teams
or we need to assign a specific transportation management team to a specific project.
Unfortunately, our resources don't allow us to have as many teams as we like.
So we will have to share teams with various projects.
Transportation management teams for example that work with incidents and work with backups that are unusual on --
in work zones would try to roam around and monitor whatever projects are in the process at the time.
Dave, any comments on that?
Well, we with a consider kind of a quick philosophy.
If work zone where we had little room, almost a tunnel-like thing, the other thing is we also have existing freeway service patrols in most of our urban areas.
And they can be used to target work zones as well.
Jerry, if there is someone on the phone that might not be aware of this, but Colorado DOT has done work in that area looking at guideline for incident management plans and work zones.
I think we have a link to that on our website.
I can't say exactly what page.
But we do have a link to that because I know they have done that and required that for their work zones as well.
That might be the best practices area.
Okay.
I saw it there as well.
Appreciate that.
Kind of a related question, is implementation of TMP typical to the state's construction department or transportation department?
In our state, the TMPs are done by the traffic operations district traffic manager and/or traffic management plan managers.
They are not done by construction.
But construction works closely with them in terms of providing information on the plans and the construction staging so that they can develop the strategies.
Dave, how about your case?
We are similar in the construction isn't the lead.
We have work zone managers, assigned people's responsibility are the work zones in every district.
We also have public information officers also in every district.
Those two combined with the design people are typically most involved.
Okay.
And just one more question.
We had several on the TMPs, will the funding process for TMP change and become more formalized as we get closer to 2007?
Question for Tracy or?
That came to Jacqui when you were talking.
The funding?
As far as our state is concerned, we try to get funding out of the project funds.
What we have done in cases where we had difficulty -- the district traffic managers and TMP managers are supposed to certify the TMP as they approach bid, when the project is ready to list.
We were making it a requirement that they get sign off from those people.
If they some districts they sort of use that as a lever and say we won't review and sign off on your project unless you provide the funding that we need.
So that's -- we kind of had to use a lever in some areas and some areas they willingly provided funding from project funds because they though that this will help keep them out of trouble.
I don't know how we can make it more focused.
I'm not sure.
Let me open up a question, kind of a general question.
How does California and Ohio select ITS strategies use in work zones.
How well have those strategies worked and what are the impact of these strategies in reducing crashing in the work zones.
That's a broad question but do you want to take a shot?
One the main strategy that we use is changeable message signs.
We were using them much more frequently and implementing program calls ADIS -- work zone information system.
What we were trying to do is coordinate the information that's provided through those changeable message signs on major projects.
In some cases we are even putting delay times and possible delay times and route information and things like that that we don't usually put on changeable message signs.
And we have them set up in six areas of the state right now and we are doing pilot studies trying to see how effective those are.
And I think what they are doing is they do traffic counts before and after.
They are also doing congestion runs with floating vehicles where they drive through the zones several types to see how long it takes to go through a specific segment.
And they compare that to what the regular travel time is.
So various things that we are trying to do to monitor the effects of the ITS elements.
We have a long way to go.
It's a hard thing to quantify the impacts.
We tried a number of things.
We tried a system that's called TIPS.
It tells the travel times through the end the work zone, dynamic and censors and changeable message signs.
We did a license plate survey and found we had quite bit of response, more than we expected.
And it was favorably looked upon.
We used web cams extensively.
Create web pages for specific projects pp we are trying now similar ITS-type thing where it tells you to speed ahead, one mile ahead the speed is 10 miles per hour.
We are putting the location out right now.
We had are a project where we will use the lane purge and turned out we were able to figure out how to keep all the lanes opened.
We are still going to try that at some point.
Other than that, I don't know what the quantified benefit is.
But other than the survey, seem to be positive.
As far as federal highway here, we are working on finalizing an implementation guide of work zone and ITS.
It won't give us a criteria or anything like that as to what system to use and what project or when to use a system.
But we do hope through that document to help provide guidance and some kind of principles as to making those decisions.
What kinds of things need to be thought about and considered at different points and starting with really thinking at 59 --
conceptual stage, I identified I may have a problem with this work zone and need to do something to help manage the traffic better.
Maybe ideas can be the solution to have that kind thinking, as the approach.
So we hope to kind of support that through this guide.
And then also we have another effort going on now and I will second what has been said in the question is and answer about that is difficult to quantify the benefits.
We are actually trying to collect information from six different sites using ITS in work zones and from that do some kind of analysis of how effective where were the systems.
It has definitely proven to be challenging.
You have a lot of variables in a work zone that complicated.
And also, of course, in a lot of situations, a lot of states that are using ITS require that there is nothing else that significantly affects traffic can be done until the ITS is deployed.
It's hard to get comparative numbers for benefits because of that.
But on the other hand, it's encouraging that it is thought of more as a possible solution to some of the congestion issues and safety issues that work zones can present.
When did you say that guide you were hoping to make that available?
By mid year.
Okay.
Excellent.
Kind of a related issue, I think Dave touched on this.
How does one define the difference between minor and major work zone impact.
Dave, you talked about this.
How do you define the difference.
What's the functional difference in the design process.
In terms of our design process, we do the alternative analysis and the policy without regard.
The policy is a simple thing.
If you don't violate the permitted lane closure times then we aren't expecting impact.
When we become aware of it, we violate the lane closure map.
We don't have a backup of third miles because no one would get in that kind of line.
But it is re indicative as we will have a major problem.
It's a product of our analysis.
More than anything.
Jacqui, get your thoughts on that.
There was a question, too, somebody asked did I recall that Ohio DOT has -- three quarters of a mile acceptable?
If not more.
Well, we allow a queue up to a mile and a half or two hours a day as the peak hours.
Like I said and a heavily traveled urban area, what a boils down to is we have three lanes we will provide three lanes if at all possible.
Jackie, did you want to take a shot at the minor versus major impact?
Sure.
As I mentioned, our maximum according to our state policy is that they should not allow more than 30 minutes of delay plus the district goes for zero delay.
When it reaches what they projected to be, say to 20 minutes delay, then that will often trigger many more strategies and typically more detailed treatment such a major type report.
Between 20 minutes to 30 minutes and more if they see that might be happening, then it triggers a lot pour activity on their part.
If it's 30 minutes or so, they usually get other people involved such as local agencies and they contact headquarters
so they let us know what's happening in case we have many suggestions for what they might do also.
Tracy, question for you.
Had a question, our training class currently scheduled to people can sign up for?
As far as the training courses, the ones I mentioned are both under development.
They aren't offered now.
They both are expected to be available within the next four to six months.
The law enforcement training course and the advanced work zone design course.
As far as the -- and I should mention that the course will be available through NHI and NHI does have existing traffic control sources.
However, I'm not sure of schedule of those particularly.
NHI should have a schedule for those.
The law enforcement course is actually -- it's geared toward training for law enforcement and how to -- where to be located in work zones.
Some practices, recommendations related to how to effectively provide enforcement in work zones.
And the audience of that one is intended to be the law enforcement officers, there probably aren't too many law enforcement officers sitting in a NHI course for a day or whatever.
The intended venue for that is working with the international association of chiefs of police and hopefully some of the police academies in the states,
getting a course offered through integrated into their curriculum that way.
As far as a course is specifically on the rule, we don't have one focused specifically on the rule.
The advanced work zone course is under development is incorporating into it a lot of things that are related to the rule and just further strategies for making work zones work better.
We saw that as a -- in talking to different panel of people that we have gotten together on that is a real --
something that was not addressed in the existing courses that they were much more focused on traffic control specifically.
A lot of the principles related the rule be looked at through that.
Appreciate that.
Dave, we have several questions that people would like to find out more about some of the software tools you are using.
We had a question to get more information on your work zone link pass analysis tool, questions about the queues '98.
Resource and on some of your other documentation.
If any information is available we would like to add it to the work zone resources web page.
Well, I think for the queue analysis, queue-98 is a licensed software and get it through McTrans or whatever.
The spreadsheet that's used in conjunction with, it we developed internally.
That's posted on ODOT's -- on my website, traffic engineering at ODOT and explains the process and we put that out there for the consultants to use.
As far as for the permitted lane closure, it's just an application we built internally.
It reads the volumes out of our account program so we update it every year in an automated fashion and we can give you information on that and however you want to do it.
Send it to us and we will add it to the list and let people link to it and we can link to McTrans or whatever for some the other tools available.
Kind of a related question, Jacqui, for you, what analysis tools you use to determine needed lanes and are they location specific?
One that Dave had put up that had the orange sections marked off, we have something similar to that --
we have a Excel spreadsheet where we put the historical volumes hourly into the sheet and compare it to the capacity of the lane.
And we use 1500 vehicles per hour per lane.
And we compare those volumes against the capacity to see what is needed.
If, for example, you have 1200 vehicles going through and you have 1500 capacity, obviously you can just close whatever lanes you need except the one.
If you have 3700 vehicles going through and only have a capacity of three, then you to leave both of those lanes open.
They just use this spreadsheet to determine what they can and can't do.
And the spreadsheet that I showed in my presentation, they used that together with the Excel spreadsheet that I discussed.
And delineating what lanes need to be open at what hour.
It's basically those two sheeting to.
I can provide that first one to you if you like.
That would be great.
Let me stay with you, Jacqui, for a second here.
The Garden State Parkway in New Jersey tracks the days when there is maximum traffic on the road and do not allow traffic closures on those days.
Do you track it by holidays?
We have a policy during holiday periods they are not allowed to have lane closures.
Say if the holiday is on a Saturday and they show it on a Friday, we do not allow lane closures on Friday.
We have a table that we use where it indicates to the contractors and design engineers exactly with a days they have to stay away from.
So we do keep those shoulder periods wide open.
Let's see here.
Question for Dave, the feasibility assessment stage is when you look at M.O.T.A.A. even before the preliminary design face?
Correct.
We call the stage one plans or some people preliminary plans or there are different names for it wherever you are, that happens basically two steps later in our plan development process.
So we can effect with the -- a lot of times we make decisions to affect bridge width.
We identify the problems and make sure that the correct bridge structure size is put into the scope for the detail design.
So, yes, we do all this before detail design starts.
Okay.
Jackie, we had several questions about the TMP process we talked about some of them.
One of them -- a couple of them had to do with whether you performed the strategies with your own force or with the construction contractor or with a separate specialty contractor.
Usually as I said, it's done by our traffic management teams -- excuse me, the traffic management plan manager and also help of the DTMs.
Behave on occasion on major projects used outside contractors.
That is something that the districts wanted to look at more.
But because of our funding problems, that has been put on the shelf for awhile.
So they are doing everything in-house right now and is as I said done by traffic teams, not construction.
Tracy, question for you, are the public outreach studies that led to the rule publicly available.
Is that on the website?
I'm not clear what that's referring to.
The only I guess specific study, I think I referred to earlier was a survey that was done by federal highway administration.
And we looked at some of those kinds of things and I think they are available via the federal highway website.
There are documents on those.
I don't know that we specifically have them on our website.
But the biggest portion of input for the rule came from the public comments that came.
We started with advanced notice of proposed rule making that asked a large series of questions to try it get initial feedback on what even we should look at addressing in the rule.
What are some the issues and constraints out there.
So those comments are publicly available on the docket.
That input if someone would like to look more closely.
We do discuss a lot of the ones that were maybe particularly influential in the preamble to each of the rule making publications that came out, the advanced notice, proposed rule, et cetera.
And those -- no one preamble contains everything.
You address the preamble that change in the previous version.
If someone wants to look at all of the things that are influential, you have to look at the preamble for each of the notices that came out regarding the rule.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
And I think at this point we will cut off the question and answer.
We have gotten to most of the questions.
We had some interesting questions and answers by the participants.
What we will do is we will put together a set of those that some of the threads and we will post them on the archive page of the
-- for the webcast so you can see what the questions were and where we do have resources from Jacqui and Dave, we will put links to it.
Watch that site in the next few days and we will get that online.
I would like to conclude with some background information on the national transportation operations coalition and the website intalk talks.
These are the member associations and member organizations of the intalk.
And you are probably all away, especially are in past webcasts.
We have a brand-new website, called intalk talks.
Receipt source page I mentioned will be on this website as well as any additional resources we get.
The site is also accessible from the member's websites.
Each one links to it in different ways.
Basically there is information about all of the talking operations websites for past websites.
We have transcripts and you can also listen to it as if you were attending it.
It's a nice resource if you don't make one of the webcasts be sure to check the archive page.
We have two discussion forms.
One is the new talking operations form and the ITS technology form.
We will be posting some key questions from this webcast on the talking operations form.
There is also an extensive set of resources and resource area on the website.
We have calendars.
Training calendars coming soon.
But that is now on-line.
You can find out about information about upcoming webcasts.
Training courses at NHI and all kinds of T-3 sessions, so it's a nice resource.
And the ICD newsletter, if you don't get the newsletter, we encourage you to subscribe to it
and you will receive twice a month information about a whole bunch of news interviews, lessons learned and resources.
Encourage you to go to the intalk site.
And that concludes our webcast today.
I appreciate everybody's participation.
Again, make sure you visit the intalk website.
You can access the resources page as well as we will put some of the threads in Q&As from our session online as well.
Thank you very much.
And we will -- want to mention, we also have a webcast next week on traffic signal optimization.
February 23.
I encourage you, if you signed up, please participate.
If you haven't, please sign up as well.
On the website.
Thank you very much and have a fine afternoon.
Okay, Bernie?
Thank you for your participation.
This concludes your call.
You may now disconnect.
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