Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the talking operation web conference rural issue 511 and traveler information. My name is Jackie and I will be your audio coordinator for today. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. You may submit questions via the web at any time by using the Q & A tab or chat feature in the lower right-hand corner of your screen. If at any time during the call you require audio assistance, please press star 0 and a coordinator will be happy to assist you. Should you experience any difficulties with today's presentation, please contact Webex technical support at 866-779-3239. I would now like to turn the presentation over to your host for today's call, miss Jocelyn Bauer. You may go ahead, ma'am. All right.Good morning or good afternoon. Welcome to the talking operations web conference rural issues, 511 and traveler information. My name is Jocelyn Bauer and I'll be giving a brief introduction to the web conferencing environment before turning this over to Jerry Werner, who we are very pleased to have as our moderator for the talking operations seminars. Please be advised that today's seminar is being recorded. I'd like to now go over a few logistical details.Today's seminar will last approximately 90 minutes with 60 minutes allocated for the speakers. And the final 30 minutes for audience question/answer. The operator will give you instructions on how to ask a question over the phone if we allow for that during the time. However, if during the presentations you think of a question, you can type it into the smaller text box underneath the chat area on the lower right side of your screen. Indicate who your question is directed towards, unless your question is intended for all speakers. Please make sure you are typing in the thin text box and not the large white area. Please also make sure that you send your question to all participants rather than just the host or the speaker. Presenters will be unable to answer your questions during their presentations, but Jerry will use some of the questions typed into the chat box to start off the question-answer session in the last 30 minutes. Seminar.If at any time you would like to zoom in on the slide on your screen, you can click on the zoom icon at the bottom of your screen. It looks like a magnifying glass with a plus sign in it. Finally, I'd like to remind you that the session is being recorded. A file containing the audio and visual portion of this seminar will be posted to the Talking Operations website within the next week. To access it please visit talkingoperations.Webex.com and click on the recorded events link to the left of the page and choose the session you'd like to view. 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 direct others in your office who may not have been able to attend this conference to access the recording. The PowerPoint presentations used during the recording are available currently on the NTOC talks website that Jerry will explain soon. Attendees will be notified of the availability of the recording and a transcript later on. At this time I would like to introduce Jerry Werner. Jerry Werner, the moderator of the talking operations webcast is the editorial director for the NTOC news letter and has consulted in the ITS field since 1991. Now I'll turn things over to Jerry who will introduce our first speaker. Thanks very much, Jocelyn.Before I introduce Al, I'd like to tell you a little bit about the new format we're trying out today. This is really something of a test of something we call talking operations 2. In the past when we have had these formats, the presentations have been -- they have been excellent presentations, but they have been somewhat unrelated, so we're trying a new format that will connect the presentation. We're going to start with a description of a key real world user or user agencies issues. In this case it's Tex D.O.T. issues.Others will address the issues that they raise. I think you'll see shortly that we're fortunate we have three of the top people on 511 in the whole country here today, so this will work out real well. Participants -- presenters will also be encouraged to talk to each other in realtime during the presentation if there's any points that are unclear. and audience members, of course, are encouraged to ask questions at any time. We'll have a Q & A session at the conclusion of the presentations. You can ask questions at any time, the only thing I would just point out that there may be some discussion on the issues -- if you ask them early, we hopefully will cover them during the interplay between the presenters, but ask them at any time, that would be fine. Okay.Let me introduce our first speaker who is Al Kosick my friend right up the road in the Austin area. He is the director of the traffic management section for the Texas Department of Transportation. He's been with them for 34 years.The section's responsibilities are to direct, coordinate and develop operational systems, provide oversight and support Tex D.O.T. districts in three areas, intelligent transportation systems. That's how Al and I first met each other.Traffic signal operations and radio operations. The section also develops statewide policies and procedures, supports and directs ITS and supports national initiatives in advancing technology and ITS. Al earned his BSEE from the University of Texas at Austin in 1969. I'm also a double E so we have that in common.He's a State of Texas registered professional engineer. Al, you can take it away whenever you want. Thank you, Jerry. My name is Al KOsick.I want to welcome everybody to this webcast. I'm going to try to talk from a user's perspective here. I'm going to give some concerns, some problems, some issues that as an agency we have with deploying 511. I'm going to pose some questions and I'm hoping that we can get some good dialogue on some of the issues that we have. Our overall issues are the following:One, I want everybody to know that we don't feel like we're under any pressure from our agency to implement a 511 system immediately, okay? I just want everybody to know that.But we do intend to deploy 511 statewide. It will happen in Texas.Two, we're not going to implement a substandard system. It's going to contain all of the information that's available. We want it to be a quality transportation information system. Our major concern is cost.Cost is a key consideration to us. Fourth, we're working on establishing statewide functional requirements now before we even consider deployment. On the cost issue, there are two types of cost, deployment and operations and maintenance, your annual costs. The important point here is that these are funded differently in Tex D.O.T. and a lot of agencies have a similar kind of problem and some have solved it in various ways. For Texas, deployment costs probably will be high.We have multiple large urban areas in Texas. We have got -- which makes the cost of deploying 511 fairly high. Three of those cities listed there are in the top 10 in the country. We have nine traffic management centers in operation in this state. All of that -- those traffic management centers collect various traffic information that we hope to have available for our statewide 511. Also Texas is a big state.We have got a lot of interstate corridors. Some of these are heavily traveled commercial corridors. Also we have got many other cities in Texas.For instance, other than the big six I have listed there, we have a traffic management center in Laredo, Amarillo, in Wichita falls. We're working on one for Corpus Christi, Tyler, Abilene, various other cities. So we're going to have a lot of smaller traffic management centers in operation in this state. The other issue is that we're more concerned about operation and maintenance costs than deployment. Although deployment will be high, we think that will partially be paid by fed dollars. We'll use federal funding on some type of project to deploy 511. But annual maintenance cost is always a concern for Tex-dot, especially ITS projects which have a higher maintenance costs typically than a bridge or a roadway or other things that highway departments do. On the operations and maintenance costs issue, Te perk-DOT, we pay for maintenance with state funds generally. We usually don't use any federal dollars for maintenance. We use our federal dollars on construction projects. We realize federal dollars can be used for operations and maintenance, but this is an agency choice. It's important to understand that that's a Tex-DOT culture issue but it impacts ITS in general and 511 in particular here, so our question on that is how do other states handle that, who pays for that ongoing cost. You know, can you get the users to help pay, MPOs, other agencies, do you use federal funds. I am concerned here that I'm not sure state D.O.T.s will continue funding 511 in the long run. We may have to find another funding model.So is there any experiences with sharing costs. I'm interested in those. On our planning for statewide deployment, we want Texas to have a uniform 511 system at the get-go. We want the same information, the same way in every urban area. We're developing a concept operation, a vision.We want that documented and approved by our administration. Third, we will deploy 511 regionally, we believe, we'll deploy a pilot at start-up, mostly because resource limitations. We don't have enough funding to deploy statewide we don't think. We don't have enough staff to get it done.We want to get an initial system up and operational in Texas. And second, deploying regionally will help us prove our concept, we can use the lessons learned when we deploy in other regions and it will prove this concept to our administration. And also deploying regionally will bring our traffic management centers into this 511 where we can provide information locally at that traffic management center that's congestion information and incidents and that sort of thing that we have available. So our deployment strategy is we want to establish a 511 website first. Our traffic management centers are all website oriented. We already show a lot of traveler information online. We show travel times, congestion levels, incidents, camera snapshots. Most of our traffic management centers have an operational website. The public is very computer literate here.We get a lot of hits on our websites. It's less initial costs to get that 511 website up in operation and it helps us resolve this coordination of multiple databases. We have got a lot of 511 information located in many different areas, and we have to coordinate how we're going to handle getting that information. Al, could I ask a question here? Sure. But your point is that it's not that you think websites are more important than 511, it's because that's the easiest way for you to debug the 511. That's correct.We think we can solve our problems initially here in state and we want that 511 website to be a complete ATIS system and then we're going to make that -- make the phone an extension of that website. The same information will be available to telephone users. But we want to deploy a website first because that's the easiest way that we can do all this information coordination, we think. Okay, thanks. Now, on operational issues, we need to resolve the functional description of our telephone user interface initially. Currently the callers we think should initially get local information. We don't want a caller to go to a 511 statewide system and has to drill down to their local or regional information. If a caller comes in, he can access local information very quickly. Now, if he needs information to other cities, other regions or corridor, then there's a menu kind of operation to get to that. That's kind of opposite of the way a 511 website will work because we're going to start that statewide. You'll come into the 511 website as a statewide 511 and then you'll drill down to your -- click down to your city or your region or whatever. So our question on that is what are other states' experiences with doing it this way. and also from telephone information, what do truckers want and need. Our commercial corridors are very important to us.We have got some very heavy commercial corridors in operation. I-35 going north and south in this state carries a ton of commercial traffic from Mexico. Interstate 10, interstate 30, interstate 40, all of those are very heavily used commercial corridors. They are very important to us.and also we want this 511 telephone system to be completely automated. We're looking at a completely automated system here. Now, we do have a highway condition reporting system in operation in this state. We need to integrate that into 511.the HCRS has an existing telephone system, telephone number. It has recently been updated to be more graphics based, g a website available. More updates of that system are planned.Now, information in our current highway condition reporting system includes events involving lengthy closures. Three to four hours or more.It has no ITS data from our traffic management centers, such as congestion information, incidents in our urban areas, travel times. It does have road closures.It does have construction projects and maintenance projects that impact those roadways, it has weather information. It's operator assistant and it has some automated information. So we need to instant gate HCRS and 511.Now, there may be some institutional issues we have to resolve there. There are several Tex-DOT offices involved with this. We need to determine responsibilities and how we're going to handle that. My question there is how do other states handle that? How have they handled it?I'm talking about integrating existing HCRS into 511, not just converting the 1-800 number to 511. So we have got a little bit different kind of a system here in that we have got a lot of road closure information that our districts input into that HCRS but we have traffic management center information and currently that is not in this HCRS. Plus our traffic management centers in our urban areas, and probably what callers will be interested in, are where incidents are located that will be cleared quickly. That's not currently showing up in our HCRS information. I wanted to raise all of these issues because they are important to us as a state on how we're going to deploy 511 and the cost of deploying 511. I have a slide here with my contact information on it. Telephone number, e-mail.And, Jerry, that's it for my presentation. Any questions from you? Nope.I appreciate that, Al. You laid out what the challengeTexas has.Let me explain this is an interactive format. Our other speakers have a lot of experience in 511 systems in other parts of the country, and they have all agreed to touch at least in part, to do two things, to explain their experience and what they have learned on their own projects but also to touch on what Al's issues are and maybe try to help Texas answer some of those questions. Our next speaker is Bob Rupert.Bob is the team leader from the transportation information management team at the federal highway office of -- it's a long title here. Office of operations, I'll leave it at that.Bob manages the travel information program and serves as a 511 travel information telephone program manager for the Federal Highway Administration. He's also a technical programs coordinator for the office. Previously he was the project manager for the operation test office in vehicle navigation in Orlando, Florida, in the early '90s and that was really a ground-breaking program as well as he was program manager for several other ITS projects dealing with traveler information. He's been with the Federal Highway Administration since 1987. Following turns with the traffic installations contractor and the very Department of Transportation. He is a civil engineering graduate of Washington university in St. Louis, Missouri. Bob, Al and I won't hold that degree against you, I guess. He's a member of the ITE and ITS America.So, Bob, without further ado, take her away. Okay, thanks, Jerry.Hopefully everybody can hear me. We have been having some phone problems on this end but eventually we get rid of this dial thing and go to the touch tone thing I've heard so much about. Good morning or afternoon, everybody.I'm going to try to go through a little background on 511 and try to talk to some of Al's questions and issues. As you'll see, we're not going to have a whole lot of distinct answers, but hopefully we'll have a lot of knowledge we can share, particularly the two presenters after me with real world examples. Real quick, the history of 511.We just celebrated the five-year birthday last week. In fact when the FCC granted it to us, to transportation agencies, actually to a lot of people on this call, government transportation agencies to provide traveler information. As a lot of things with the FCC, they did not include any implementation issues or schedules or the details of how this would happen, really leaving that up to the agencies, to the telecommunication carriers, to everybody. No federal requirements or mandates.511 is a voluntary program. We're glad to see people are picking up on it, though. It's a good thing.The only responsibility of the U.S. D.O.T. was that we were supposed to facilitate the ubiquitous deployment of 511. The last bullet was actually a little less than four years ago at northern Kentucky. So we have got a little experience certainly on initially deploying systems, but we don't have a lot of information yet. We're still a lot of learning to go along.In order to help with the facilitation we did establish the 511 deployment coalition and that group of folks has provided most of the information I'm going to be speaking about. You can see the other groups that are part of it.The American public transportation association, ITS America and the U.S. D.O.T. The website at the bottom has a wealth of information. I'm going to be speaking from a lot of it and drew a lot from there, but it has a list of contacts if you want to get in contact with any of the deploy deployers, all that information is up there along with minutes of the meeting and things like that. One of the big issues in Texas is cost, and that's not uncommon. That seems to be a lot of issue for everybody.I've got about two or three slides here on various cost structures. I'm not going to go through a lot of the details on them, but to just sort of give you an idea of some of the range that we're talking about here as far as what it costs for 511. And that in itself is a bit of a challenge because 511 is just a mechanism for deploying traveler information. A lot of the data gathering is actually applicable for a lot of things, so trying to split that up is a bit of a challenge. This slide is actually from the very first deployment of systems report the deployment coalition put together on business models and they pulled some of this cost data out of there. The key thing from this is if you look at the big chunk of money here is for the data gathering. As I mentioned, this assumes there was nothing there to start with so this would be starting from scratch, which most areas of the country are not doing, thankfully. There is some existing infrastructure.So if you look at the data processing and the telephone 511 costs, you see they're fairly similar between the medium and large Metro areas. What we're talking about are the areas essentially over a million in population for the metropolitan area. But you also see it's not free.That's one of the things we have learned is that certainly on the short term there's not going to be a lot of other income or resources put into 511. It is going to take a lot of subsidation by the public sector. Bob, can I ask a question.As I understood Al's issue, it's not so much what it costs but who's going to pay for it. Do all these models explain whether it's public, private -- I know it's pretty much public sector, like state D.O.T. or federal highway. I'll talk about that in about four slides, sir.One of the challenges of the interactive format, but that's okay. So you look on here and you can also see the range, particularly from 120 to $700,000. That's something else that we have seen, that it is pretty consistent. Those costs are flexible and variable depending on the carriers you're working with, the number of switches, the extent of your telephone system. There's a lot of things that I think the people in the transportation industry have learned over the last four years about the telephone industry. I'm not sure if it was an entirely painless operation. The next slide I'm looking at is earlier this year the I-95 corridor coalition sponsored two pier to pier workshops that brought in some of the 511 deployers