I would like to introduce your host, Jocelyn Bauer. Good Day and welcome to the talking operations WorkZone implementation. I will be giving a brief introduction to the Web conferencing environment before turning the session over to Tracy Scriba, who we are very pleased to have as our moderator. Today's seminar is being recorded. It will last approximately one hours 45 minutes, the hour will be four questions. Indicate who your question is intended for. Make sure that you are typing into the small box and not the white area. Presenters will be unable to answer your questions during the presentation, but Tracy will use some of the questions for the question and answer sessions in the last part of the seminar. This session is being recorded. The National Transportation coalition website will have this posted in the next week. I will tie that into the chat box shortly. We would like you to direct others in your office to the recording. It will be available in the next week. Attendees will be notified a liability of the power point. At this time, I would like to introduce, Tracy, the moderator of this web cast. She is part of the FHWA team. She is leading the efforts for out reach and the recently published WorkZone rule. She is responsible for other federal highway WorkZone areas, best practices, performance measures and ITS work sounds. She has a degree from the University of Virginia. Now, I will turn this over to Tracy who will give a brief overview. Good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you are located. We certainly have a lot of interest in this Web cast. That is good to see. I know that the WorkZone is on a lot of people's minds as we approached the October 12th deadline for this year's role. We have three great speakers today, actually have three states and two speakers from Washington state that will be speaking to us today. You will hear a lot of great ideas from them as to what they have done so far to implement the rule. This is Maryland, Virginia and Washington state. They have all been in front of a lot of states as far as moving forward in this area of role implementation. We can get some good ideas and from these folks today as they share of what they have done in their states as far as their process for implementing the rule. Each will share with a particular area that they have worked on. I will introduce each speaker individually as we get to them. To start, I will give an overview, a little bit of a background to set the stage for what we will talk about for the rest of the webcast. It has more than two years since the rule has been implemented in the fall of 2004. We are about two-thirds of the way through the compliance. For implementing the rule. The rule itself establishes requirements and establishes requirements for addressing or understanding WorkZone safety impacts and developing strategies to manage those. It does apply to all federal a highway projects. That is primarily state DOT projects but also involves local projects that do receive federal a funding. To kind of a captured with the key concepts are, I try to boil it down into a field bullet point here. In a nutshell, we can be more effective in reducing the WorkZone mobility and safety impacts that we face on projects, if we better understand those projects, anticipate them and planned for them. We do not need to react in the moment to a particular situation. It might happen on a particular project, or if we can anticipate the safety concerns as we go through the planning and project development process. That kind of get at the second bullet is doing its early in the process. We have more options available at that point in time and can better take advantage of those as we look at the alternatives and come up with the alternatives for our project. What are the WorkZone impacts with those at and how can we address them? Another key principle is to consider solutions that go beyond the immediate location of the WorkZone. With this role, there is an update to the former rule. It focus primarily on the traffic control, at which is a key component to providing a safe WorkZone. What we are also finding that the issues in WorkZone are more complicated with ingestion, maintenance and rehabilitation work on existing roads. That involves more complex situations. If we can think of alternate routes and use them to the best degree possible just beyond immediate WorkZone area, we can have more options available to us to better manage our WorkZones. The last idea behind the rule is to integrate the thinking in the agency and DOT culture. Some of the components of the rule, the policy in particular. That brings me to what are the three key provisions in the rule? The course is, the policy area that I just mentioned that is a requirement for agencies to develop and implement a policy for WorkZone impact. That is a policy that drives the agency's approach to addressing WorkZone safety and mobility impact. Some policies and procedures that are more across the agency, they would affect all of the practices or larger practices in the agency. The project level, some procedures that would specifically get into the project area and address how to manage impact on individual projects. Let me get back to the right side here. Kind of breaking that down a little further, in the agency procedures area, the second box, there are four main areas that are addressed, one is to conduct-that is a recommendation in the rule but not a specific requirement. And then a requirement to have appropriate training for those involved in making decisions that affect WorkZones through preliminary engineering, design process, the construction process, the traffic engineering folks, law-enforcement, all of those that do have an impact on the implementation of WorkZones and how well they operate. The use of safety and operational data. Again, the trading in the safety and operational area were in the former rule, but it was not recovering operational data. We expanded that and used data that agencies have to better manage our WorkZones and the area of reviews of. Is used to be every one year. And the last box, there are two main areas to that. One is to identify significant projects. The projects that we think are likely to cause a relatively high level of destruction and need more attention. Develop plans to address the impact for the station WorkZone. The are required for all federal aide projects. The difference between that and the former traffic control plans is that they are a more comprehensive approach to WorkZone management. At a still contain a traffic control plan for all projects. For some projects there are none to other components that need to be there. That is the public information component and an operational strategies component. Operational strategies could be things like alternating the signal timing on alternate routes, using ITS to help manage the work song, using traffic incident management plans, those things are operational status trees. The operational strategies component is required for significant projects and are optional, but encouraged for other types of projects, or consideration of them is encouraged. That is the rule and a nutshell. That is covering a lot in just a few minutes here. Just to move to where we are at now, the efforts were first focused on our end at building some awareness of the rule and helping agencies that would be affected by the world to know what the rule is about. What I just did, but a little more detailed. We develop an implementation Guide and sponsored a series of regional workshops around the country. We had all states but one participate in those. We had six of them in locations that we try to make a little more feasible to have participants attend. They had an opportunity for a lot of discussion around a lot of DOTs. We are now in the mode of ongoing support for implementing the rule. I think the Web cast today is providing who have gone before and broken the ground and sharing what they have done. Just to show you briefly the implementation resources, there are four guides that are out now. These are an overall guide that implementing the role. That explains the provisions a bit and get some ideas for how an agency might implement them. There are three more technical guides that support specific aspects of the rule. There are public not out rate aspects. One is on conducting works on impact assessment. The-all of them are available electronically by our web site. We are awaiting the hard copies to come in from the printer on the impact Assessment guide. They should be here shortly. We also developed some frequently asked questions based on some topics that seemed to come up frequently. We are in the process of making some updates to those where you can access those. Some additional things that we are working on is a resource CD. You can see what it will look like. It will pull the resources into one place on the CD. That is the idea. It is not so much a lot of new material but pulling into one place where there is a handy way to access it. We are also working on a checklist that is almost completed and will be on the CD and web site. As far as training, there is an NHI course that is under development. Unfortunately, it is not done yet. We are wanting to have a pilot of that in late me, that is the hope for that. We hope it will be out this summer and available for other agencies to schedule it. This is just some of the type of ongoing implementation support that we have going. One aspect that I will point out to you is sharing examples. Today's webcast is not one way of doing that. We have been putting examples on our web site as we have been able to develop them. There are some examples of doing impact assessment, public information out reach examples, things like that that will hopefully give you more of a concrete idea of what some of these aspects might look like. All of this information is available on our web site. You can see the web site address there. If I cannot copy it down, it will be available on the slides later. We did a survey through our division offices in December and January on asking about progress and what challenges might be there. I will share with you the results of that. On the area of policy, you can see there that the top one is the states that were doing something prior to the rule. The purple color is the states that have completed it since then. They have completed their policy and got it approved as needed within their agency. Most it are in progress right now. There are only a few that have not started according to the survey. There were 38 respondents. We have about three quarters or so of folks responding. Eight in the impact assessment data use area, combining it together, we have a lot less completed in this area and a lot more not started yet. These are areas that will be evolving even after October as a disease get a better sense of what data they might be looking to use. In the process reviews area, we had some that were doing in prior rule. We have about five Total-the training area, about five total have in place what they need. There is still ongoing work at. Like the data area, that will continue to evolve for a period of time. There are certain steps and efforts that need to be made by October to be considered in the process as far as what the rule of compliance. There is an evolution that will happen with that over time. Process reviews, a number of agencies have been doing that and some need to adjust to address the additional aspects of the rule. That is on the way. Defining significant projects, we have had a lot of agencies make a lot of progress there and finish what they have been working on in that area. Identifying the projects will happen after the definitions are settled. Expect that to lag a little behind the definition aspect. In the area of TMP comment that is still in the earlier stages I think that it will be affecting projects more after October whether they come on line and the TMP is developed for those. A few of the areas are at the more challenging areas are the area of training, and determining what is appropriate training. Agencies are looking how to update their courses or some materials that we might provide such as the Advanced workshop that will help meet some of those needs. The data area, that is an area that will evolve over time. That is an area that we will be booking to put some more information out on, just a technical resource to help in that area. Process reviews, some agencies have moved forward and completed that. Others have looked at Traffic Control reviews that we already do, how do we expand that to address what is currently in the rule to meet the process review requirement? This is my last slide here, a lot of states have formed some type of work group. You will hear that in a few of the presentations coming up. The process of developing the policy, it might be a yearlong process to develop and get approvals and a policy in place. That is an approximate timeline. I would say that most states are well under way, almost all are. There are a few that are not in that category. A vast majority have moved ahead. I will introduce our next speaker. You will hear from some states that have moved ahead significantly and accomplished a lot, and in a large degree are barely completed with their efforts to implement the rule, or at least to get things in place to bring that implementation into action within the agency. Our first speakers are from Washington state. One is Frank Newboles from Washington state DOT and he will be a defined by Cathy necklace. Frank Newboles is the safety mobility Manager. He has served for 29 years, mostly in construction and traffic engineering. He has also been the state works on manager for the past seven years. He had previously held positions as a regional works on an engineer. He served as the technical and policy expert to the task force. He was on the technical committee and officers on the safety committee. Cathy Nicholas is currently in the Olympia Washington Federal Highway Division. She is the construction pavement engineer there as well as the division works on safety contact. She is a registered in the state of Washington where she has worked for the last 14 years. They will work together on giving us the next presentation. We will get started here I will start off with our lead portion here as we get into our implementation overview and then Cathy will join me throughout the presentation later on. Just to spend a little time where we are over all with implementing the rule. I wanted to mention that the concept and the intent of the rule matches pretty closely WashDOT's philosophy which this. We felt it was a good thing and could see no road blocks in moving this ahead. Part of that reason, the reasons behind that, we were already accomplishing some of this work, and we maybe we're not calling it the same thing or doing it on a consistent basis or an overall systematic level, but it is really where we want to be. I think that we have a pretty good and consensus internally that that was the direction to go. I think to help us get a little push in going in the right direction. We started early in the process, like a lot of states did would be advanced notice of proposed rulemaking and worked through that and participated in some of the ongoing national discussions through and other various conferences and tried to stay on board and learn from other states. The teams that we developed internally here were a combination of some WashDOT's teams and some partnerships with the FHWA as well. For us, the major elements that we had to tackle to accomplish the larger impacts from the rule were developing a new policy, which we will talk about in more detail here, and then updating our design manual to include a new WorkZone section and overhauling our training to accommodate the new rule. Just as a quick status, we have a few remaining items, probably the largest major element that we have left that we are working on is our WorkZone design. Overall, I think that we are pretty well on track to working through this spring and summer and getting all of those pieces of the puzzle together. Just briefly, our experience so far, it has been so far so good. We have been getting good feedback across the state. I think that we have tried to work on that concept of we are doing the good things, but we need to do them smarter. What we mean by that is to be more consistent. To it on a broader scale, looking at all of the WorkZone impacts and not just focusing on the project level. Some of our challenges are, we need to put a little more detailed guidance on their on TMP, which we are working on. We are also working on the elements of the rule, and a lot of the things that we have developed and integrating those into our existing processes. We have done quite a bit of that already. This is sort of a fluid thing. The more that you work on it, the more that you not see opportunities along the way. We are working on some WorkZone milestones in our process and that type of thing. We have some next steps, as I mentioned before, the training issue. We are also looking at establishing some performance measure for WorkZones. I think that we will be, especially later this summer and fall working pretty hard on that ongoing oversight and support to make sure that things move ahead regularly. Here is the main focus of today's discussion. That is, our new WorkZone policy it. This is just an outline of the next few slides.