Thank you, good day. This is Focus on State Initiative and on Performance Measures. I will be giving a brief introduction to the web conferencing environment before turning it over to David Helman, who we are pleased to have today. Today's seminar is being recorded. I would like to go over a few of the logistics of the seminar. It will last 90 minutes. With 60 minutes for presenters and 30 minutes for question and answer. If you think of a question, you can type it into the smaller text box under the chat area on the lower right-hand side of the screen. Indicate who your question is directed towards unless your question is intended for all presenters and panelists. Please make sure you are typing into the send text box and send your question to all participants rather than just the host and the speaker. Presenters will be unable to answer your questions during the presentations but David, will use some of the questions for the question answer session in the last 30 minutes of the seminar. If at any time you would like to zoom in on the slide that is showing on your screen, you can click on the zoom icon at the bottom left of your screen. It looks like a magnifying glass with a plus sign. This session is being recorded a file containing the audio and visual portion of the seminar will be posted to the National Transportation Operation Coalitions website otherwise known as Intalk within the next week. I will type that address into the chat box shortly. Due to the size of the file, recorded files are available for viewing, listening purposes only and cannot be saved to your own computer. We encourage you to encourage others who cannot access the recording. The PowerPoint presentations will be available within the next week on the Intalk site as well. Attendees will be notified of the PowerPoint and the closed captioning of this seminar. At this time I would like to introduce Dave Helman, the moderator of today's webcast. He is the program manager for the U.S. Federal Highway Administration in Washington D.C. He guides the development and execution and assessment of the Federal Highway TIM program and guidance to the public and private sector partners and Federal Highway field offices. He is a founder and ex-officio member of the Traffic Management Coalition. He serves on committees of the research board. Several research panels of the cooperative research program and the Tripoli Standards Working Group. He served on the working group of the National Fire Service Incident Management System Consortium that developed model procedure guise for highway incidents and on another group of the Association of America that developed the traffic incident of the plan. Also known as TIM. Prior to joining Federal Highway, he served as safety programs engineer and in the West Virginia Department of Highways and was a senior associate with the National Traffic Consulting firm and he holds bachelors from University of Illinois and Rock Ford college and holds degrees in engineering and he is a registered professional engineer. Now we will turn things over to David who will introduce our first speaker. I am going to first welcome everybody on the webcast. I see we have 71 people now in attendance. And before I introduce April Armstrong, I am going to make a few opening remarks myself. About traffic and management performance measurement and about the general structure of today's webcast. The webcast will focus around a State Initiative Federal Highway Administration currently under way in 11 states and on performance measurement, and April Armstrong will from NSIC will summarize where we are with that workshop and within a few minutes, with that initiative in a few minutes and she will be followed by presentations from Bill Legg from Washington State D.O.T. and from Paul Clarke from the Florida D.O.T.; and Washington and Florida are two of the is one states that are wrestling with technology here. Traffic incident management is an activity that no one agency owns and not core function of one agency even from the ones that own the facility of. There are many part participants however in managing and in preparation for and communications surrounding traffic incidents. And traffic incident management programs are multi agency and in their very structure and I say multi agency, I should say multi partnered because some of the most, some of the important partners are not agencies at all but private sector organizations. And so to be properly planned and coordinated and executed a management program needs to be strategically based and that is have program goals that are mutually agreed to by the participating agencies and partners and multi agency program plan or road map and a means of coordinating, budgeting among the various partners in order to get the resources to carry out the program and lastly, a means of program measurement and evaluation and a program for traffic incident management. As the Secretary of Transportation and State of Washington did you go McDonald said, what gets measured, gets performed and so, I think performance measurement in traffic management will also lead to the practice or will sort of force the issue of traffic incident measurement. What gets tracked does not performed and the closer we keep an eyen o what is going on, the more likely we are to do a better job of taking care of the situation. Am safety agencies have measured their performance for a long time. Primarily response time but other measures they have created to what their agency does. It is what they get graded on. People that provide budgets want to know how fast the police department. Fire department and EMS got on the scene. Not only highway incidents but everything they respond to. Transportation agencies have long measured physical infrastructure indices and and ratings and operationally perhaps they have done inventory and pavement markings for maintenance. But transportation agencies are just now getting into the practice of measuring operational performance. Program performance measures are a little bit deference than individual agency measures in that a program in the case of the tracking program spans on what a number of agencies do. And the data needed to evaluate what happens on an incident doesn't belong, and is not contained totally in any one agency but there are many agencies that not only share the practice but have the data on what happens on the scene. And their own data basis. So, before, program performance measures measure the aspects of the entire program there are multi agencies working together and not individual agency achievements. They need to the data needed to cover is not contained in any one's agency database. The two primary sources are transportation and law enforcement and the two biggest sources that probably cover 95 percent of what you need to measure what you want to measure in track management and the performance. But a public safety agency is the first one on the scene. Law enforcement or fire and rescue or emergency medical and transportation agencies are often the last one on the scene and cleaning up the remnants of the incident of the public safety and they have been closed long before the transportation agencies left and the activities are still on the scene. And in order to get a better view and I think one of the presentations after me will have a better diagram of this, what is really needed to analyze what happens over the entire duration of an incident belongs in, resides in more than one database. And the performance measures focus state initiative, we have both transportation and law enforcement people from all over the 11 states involved in the initiative. The primary data sources are the law enforcement dispatcher or cab systems and in transportation, there are a number of transportation management centers. TMCs that have all kind of archive data on traffic flow. Service patrols are a very rich source of data. Especially where the data are integrated with TMCs and service patrols keep track and of especially the 24/7 service patrols and they have a very good database on all the stops and all the minor things that they normally wouldn't get and even things law enforcement wouldn't get and all of the state combined and pretty good picture of what happens on the incident scene. All the sources of data too and the performance measures of what you may want to look at. And safety measures and crash data and that is contained in a number of agencies at the state level. That may be DMVs or law enforcement agencies. Focus state's initiative itself involves 11 states and you see them there, the abbreviations of the 11 states. As I said, we had transportation and law enforcements transportation and in most cases these were state D.O.T. people from the Department of Transportation and the law enforcement or either the state police or the highway patrol or the state patrol. Depending on with a they are called in the state. We also had Federal Highway support from each of the 11 division offices in each of the states plus headquarters and resource centers. The purpose of the initiative was to define program level and performance measurements that go beyond agency measurements to measure entirety of what happens on the scene of an incident. The incident calls to collect and enhance the state for performance measurement. We are now in the process of starting. We finished workshops as April who follows me will explain and we are in the process of helping the states exercise their action plans and I think the two presentations from the states that will follow will give a broader insight in what is happening in the two states. Right now, I would like to introduce April Armstrong who will summarize what is happening or summarize the initiative where we are with the workshops and what the workshops set out to do. And the status of the initiative. April has more than 12 years of multi-disciplinary experience focusing on analyses of plans. Procedures, processes and technology to improve the execution of complex tasks involving multiple organizations. Her area of expertise including strategic planning and communications and out reach. Ms. Armstrong has designed and facilitated more than 200 workshops and worked across variety of domain and worked in transportation and Homeland Security -- April? Thank you, Dave. Well, it is my honor to work with the professionals that are participating in the Focus State Initiatives at the workshop and it is my pleasure to present and review some of the out comes of the workshops and as Dave said, sort of summarize where the initiative stands today. Let me see here today. Jocelyn, I am having a hard time moving my slide. There we go. Okay, thank you. I will touch on the approach that was used to develop those program level performance measures that Dave referenced as well as to develop the action plans that the states are currently beginning to I am implement. And the approach by way of background that was used, first of all. With a sponsored one on the east coast and west coast and which shared a common format. The east coast kicked it off by nominating. If you will, a set of objectives that they felt that they sort of shared in common. The question was that they were asked to think about was what are the things we want to accomplish with respect to traffic management. And moving beyond any specific agency or specific state and thinking more broadly. So the folks in the room began to generate ideas and I will also mention we used again as part of the approach, we made use of the group systems technology which allowed the participants to simultaneously offer up their ideas and to see each other's ideas on the screens as they were being nominated. That enabled them to comment on each other's ideas and merge and collapse the ideas which led to the boiling down to the ten objectives that we will review. That just helped generate a richer set of both ideas as well as discussions on the idea to say make sure the objective and the ensuing performance measures were clearly understood and mutually understood. So this was done by the east coast participants first and they nominated for each of the objectives. Specific performance measures that they felt could be used to evaluate progress toward that objective and they also identified from their perspective data sources and Dave touched on the common findings such as the fact that in then, it was sound found that approximately 95 percent of the data could be collected by a small, relatively small data sources forecast. That was able to be concluded and validated through the exercise and they also identified strengths and weaknesses as opportunities and threats environmentally from their perspective would impact by helping or hindering their ability to implement these program level performance measures. The west coast participants then took these inputs generated at the east coast workshop and then added on them. They added additional objectives that they felt were not adequately captured. They nominated performance measures that they felt potentially could be used to measure progress and then all of the participants came together in a workshop in dal also, Texas where for the first time they had the opportunity to first of all come together and second of all review the synthesized out comes of the first two workshops. The analyst team, FHWA analyst team had taken the data and attempted to consolidate and again additional objectives that were perhaps redundant and in some cases or things that may be, were sort of a hybrid of an objective. A performance measure. Value statement. They cleaned that up. Presented this to the Dallas workshop participants and spent the first, I would say half a day to full day further refining that. Further tweaking that and further challenging the objectives to make sure they were measurable. That they were specific and actionable, et cetera. They then spent the latter half of the first day and all of the second day developing these action plans for implementing a sub set of those performance measures and we will talk about that in a second. So, to summarize the accomplishments to date of the initiative before we dive into the specific performance measures that were selected by implementation of the 11 states. First of all, more than 50 traffic management practitioners came together and participated in this and they did define ten program level objectives. Meaning multi-agency objectives that are shared across three, what we are calling goal areas. They defined a total of 30 candidate program level performance measures and we say candidate because these are not things that are being mandatorily implemented anywhere. They nominated up as ways to measure up the ten objectives. One of the most important. And most important accomplishment of the initiative so far has been the development of common understanding of some core terms and such as incident clearance time that in the past ten to 15 years have sort of percolated around the community in a very general way and yet we founder in these workshops mean, a minimum of three different things and you know, depending on which state or which practitioner you are speaking to. It is found anything to mean incident clearance time anything from, the time at which the last responder leaves an incident scene to the time in which the last evidence of debris or evidence of an incident has been removed from the scene. Or the time in which the roadway is actually completely cleared for full or normal operations to resume. Those are three different meanings that we found that the participants found to be associated with the one term. So one of the greatest accomplishments I think of the initiative even just this far has been the breaking out of that term and the specific identification of in fact three different terms. So it is very clear and mutually understood that those are three different things we are talking about. That is no pun intended but one of the biggest road blocks in the past to shared performance measures and the ability to share and compare results across jurisdictions or states. That was a major step forward. A second, I think, very important accomplishment of the workshop was as they mentioned earlier, this involvement of the law enforcement practitioners with the transportation prosecutors. FHWA had planned for the folks to participate in the first two workshops, the east and west coast workshops. It is not in the original plan that they would participate in the third workshop and that because the D.O.T. and practitioners are the ones who will be coordinating implementation of the plan. But I think it is very significant in the east and west coast workshops. These transportation practitioners and their law enforcement partners in cohesion articulated to FHWA their view of the law enforcement participation in the workshop. They took that on board and did, as you have since learned, involved the law enforcement folks in the workshop and there is full consensus that was absolutely the right decision. And that was a big step forward as well. Finally all is 11 of the focus states have agreed to implement the program level measures and so, let's move forward and dive into that. So with respect to the three goal areas that I mind, the objectives and the supporting performance measures fell into one or more of these three categories that you see on the screen. Reducing consideration and improving safety and improving communications to reduce the impacts of incidents on customers. I will review these and note that these are not in priority order. They are just listed here. But be clear these are not necessarily in priority order. First of all, reducing incident notification time and reducing roadway clearance time. This is one of the ways they distinguish between a roadway clearance answer incident clearance answer the third one you see there of course is reducing incident clearance time and recovery time. And reducing the need for responders to arrive on scene after a notification. Kind after response oriented objective. Reduce the number of secondary and secondary incidents and the severity of primary and secondary incidents and that was largely the notion that primary incidents may not be preventable. But they felt they could impact secondary incidents. Number seven developing an reassuring familiarity with multi goals and objectives and supporting procedures and this is largely a training related goal. Number, or objective. Number eight, improving communication between responders and managers. This is largely, sort of an across the TIM partnership area. Not with the driving public at this point. Number nine gets into communication with the driving public providing timely after and useful travel information to the public on a regular basis during an incident and number ten. Regularly evaluating and using road user feedback to improve traffic incident management. These were ten things that these 50 practitioners across 11 states. That they all felt were important to accomplish with respect to traffic incident management. I will not read through all 30 of the, of the program level performance measures that were nominated. I would invite you to do so at your leisure. Looking at the briefing specifically. Pages eight through 12. What I would like to do, because they are all culled out here and they are related to the objective that they support, what I would like to do is draw your attention to two of the measures that all 11 states grow to implement and this, again, is one of the biggest steps forward of the initiative so far. Which is not only that they have agreed to implement these, because I will mention in a moment, many if not most of the states to one degree or another, they are already measuring these two specific performance measures but to agree to come back together within six to 12 months and to actually compare their results to share their experiences and how it, you know, how it went in terms of implementing these and measuring these to exchange practices in how they went about doing it, that is a significant thing. It is the first time that that will have been done in the community. For this objective number two. Reducing roadway clearance time, the program level measure that the folks nominated and agree to have in common is the tracking the time between the first recordable aware innocence. Whether it is detection notification. That line is increasingly blurred of an incident by a responsible agency. And the first confirmation that all traffic lanes are available for traffic flow. So that is the first one they have all agreed to implement. The second one relates to objective number three which is reducing incident clearance time. Which they, they define two ways of measuring that. One which is not shown here. Letter A is the time at which the last piece of evidence of the incident is removed from the scene. This particular one B, they agreed to implement in common. Which is the time of the first recordable awareness of the incident and the time of the last responder has left the scene. Now, there were other states, other performance measures that received significant support which we will talk about in a moment but they did not receive the consensus by all the participants and they were actually. Each state was invited to nominate three or four performance measures that they would agree to implement and the way we discovered these two was that we essentially kind of looked at like a scatter plot diagram to see which of the nominated measures lined up and that's how the two emerged. But again, they identified one measure that they would also take on board and experiment with implementing. So that's what we will talk about in a moment. The reinstates did not have more, that they agreed to implement, was primarily. They either indicated they did not meet the state specific needs. Therefore they did not feel that some of the other measures had as much value to them as a state