If Nick Owens is on line, please press star zero. Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. I will turn your call over to the host is Jocelyn Bauer. Good day and welcome to the operations webcast. I will be giving a brief introduction to the web conference environment. Before turning this session over to our host to we are pleased to have as our moderator. Please be advised that this seminar is being recorded and will last approximately one hour and 45 minutes. During the presentation you can type the question into the small text box underneath the smaller question box. Indicate to your question is directed toward the unless your question is intended for all presenters. Presenters will be unable to answer your questions during the session, but Dave will use some of the questions that were typed into the chat box for the question and answer session. We would like you to direct others in your office who may not have been able to attend this of conference to access the recording. At this time I would like to introduce a Dave Helman who is the manager for the Federal Highway administration. He guides the development, execution of the federal highway program and also provides technical assistance and guidance. He was one of the founders of the National Traffic Incident Management Coalition and serves on its various committees and working groups. He serves on the Transportation Research Board and is a member of the Freeway Operations Committee. He serves on several research panels of the National Cooperative. He was a member of but the incident mentioned standard record. He served on the working group of the National [ indiscernible ] consortium that developed a model procedures and on the panel of the towing and recovery Association of America Develops Traffic Incident Management. Prior to working on the federal highway user does the State Department engineer and was a senior associate with the National check the consulting firm. He holds degrees from the University of L.A. And Rockford College. He is registered professional engineer. I will turn things over to get things started. Thank you, Jocelyn. Welcome to this webinar on performance management for traffic incident management. For the past two years to 11 states have been engaged on developing operational performance traffic incident management and collecting and analyzing data defined by the measures. We should remove incidents as quickly as possible. Traffic incident management involves many partners and public safety, transportation, and the private sector working together as a coordinated team to accomplish these goals. Measurement of the success of these efforts involves measurement of the performance of the team as opposed to the measurement of the performance of individual agencies or partners. Public safety agencies have long collected data on the speed of their response. Our measurement of the success of incident clearance has been problematic for a couple of reasons. First, the data does not reside in any one database alone. Therefore the measurement of the incident clearance involves integrating data from many different databases. Certainly there has been known nationally recognized definition of these data points. The two most comprehensive data bases that cover most of the incident data points are owned by law enforcement and transportation agencies. Two years ago law enforcement and transportation agencies from 11 states that to develop definitions and then to develop action plans to divide them in collecting and analyzing data. Next week the 11 states will begin in Milwaukee for a final state workshop to discuss progress, lessons learned, and outlined the future actions to advance the state of practice in traffic incident management program performance measurement. Like the operational measurements of roadway problems and incident clearance secondary incidence have not been defined uniformly. We will focus on the traffic incident management. The following a brief description of the initiative by Nick Owens of SAIC who is our contract lead. Florida and Wisconsin will make presentations on their efforts. He has over 30 years in the design, and implementation and presentation experience. He has led a number of evaluations of developments supporting traffic incidents including Washington State and Utah. Prior to joining SAIC Mr. Owens worked for the Department of Transportation as a legislative liaison. He has supported the FHWA and the federal Highway Safety Administration. Nick? Let me just bring up Nick's slides here. We will get started in just a moment. All right. Nick, we are ready for you. Nick, are you on the line? Sorry about that. Hello, everybody. My name is Nick Owens of SAIC. I would like to give you a brief overview of the TIM project and what we have been involved in. First I would like to very quickly go through some background and the context for why we went ahead and implemented the program. This represents the last 15-16 years of activity that has been going on at TIM. This is things like the establishment of the National TIM Coalition, the self-assessment guide and things like that leading up to the beginning of the FHWA. DOT secretary's started a major initiative and have included traffic incident management. The focus of the initiative actually drives this. It plays right into what the Secretary is looking at. There is also the development of the national unified whole. There was a proposal issued by the TRB to do training. So there has been a fair amount of activity in terms of overall management and improving performance and things like that. Obviously we are a key part of that. Within the context of the TIM focus initiative performance measurement one of the things that we have been looking at. Also what are our states doing to develop an integrated TIM program. Share responsibility between multiple organizations. Obviously the program has to look at how can all of those responsibilities it coordinated taking a regional approach to management, and defining roles and establishing a memorandum of understanding. A number of states are moving ahead with this, but this has been a big shift within TIM. There can be anything from program review to real-time data exchange. There are a number of initiatives around the country involved. Kaplan is one example of a program that is providing real-time. Systematic assistance is being implemented and the New York City region. Washington State and Utah both participated in exchange integration field operation. Over half of the states are moving ahead to try to get that in place. Obviously one of the key things for our program is funding. Rather than each agency looking at stovepipe funding, we must come up with some type of strategic planning our collaborative process that can be used to identify and obtain dedicated funding that can obviously -- each agency would have their own budget. But we could coordinate the sharing of funds or leveraging of funds, both capitol and operating. Training and skills development. The proposal that was recently put forward would be a major step. Measure standards to evaluate progress performance. Obviously outreach. That will also be part of the focus state initiative. But we are looking at there is primarily going to be targeted toward senior management. Integrated TIM, simply the slide just shows what we were just talking about the need pictorial view. You might have the components oriented performance measures and things like that. Integrated program performance measures. Obviously this involves a number of our responders, as well as the end users. And this, I think, slide does a very good job of representing the whole concept of a program level performance measurement. If you look at the bars they represent each individual agency and their role. There is a lot of agencies collecting this data, but what we are hoping to see established -- and there are several states involved in this initiative. We will be able to measure the duration of an incident from the time that the first responder arrives until the time when the last responder leaves the scene. That brings us into the issue of, why would we want to measure this? Improve highway safety. Improve responders safety and overall safety. The couple of key things is that they to enable agencies to track progress toward meeting goals. How are things working? Are there areas we can make improvements? Are there particular practices that are highly effective? This is just a way of finding out how we're doing with strengths and weaknesses and things like that. We use this to educate decision-makers. This provides the decision-makers the information they need to make decisions on how to allocate resources and staff. This brings us to the TIM performance measurement focus state initiative. We have a total of 11 states involved in this. What we thought of doing was to have to regional workshops, one in Virginia and California. The eastern regional workshop had six states. Through these two workshops the states define objectives and performance measures and define common definition. They then had a national workshop in Dallas, and at that time with these dates by consensus elected to performance measures that they would test and develop state action plans which detailed how they plan on implementing these performance measures and what actions need to be taken to implement the performance measures. 2005-the current time has been a period of testing on behalf of the states. This obviously leads to the next week's workshop in Milwaukee. The idea there is to see how the state has done, what has worked, and what hasn't worked. It is a chance to take a look at a year-and-a-half's worth of experience and take a look at what works and what doesn't. Missouri has agreed to participate as an observer. This is the first time a state not directly involved will participate, which will help provide on the progress of the initiative and what to do next. This has been a very good mix of FHWA, from the division offices, law enforcement and transportation officials. This shows the states who participated by a particular work shop. These are the ten program level objectives that were identified by the states. These represent the consensus from the two regional workshops. In the interest of time I would recommend you may be not go through each of these, but move ahead to get to that were selected for the national workshop and focus on those a bit more. These are the two that were selected, the objectives, two and three. Reduce roadway clearance which is defined as return to operational status. If you think back of the charge the time stamp could easily come from one agency, perhaps a law enforcement agency. The good news is that a lot of the states either were collecting data or have some method in place. This is defined as the time between the incident and the removal of all evidence of the incident. This includes [ indiscernible ]. This may or may not include the repair of structures and things like that. This is really more considering the time by which the last responder leaves the scene and traffic flow has resumed. The next slides shows the progress made in testing measures. Some states have a degree of information exchange, but Wisconsin is reporting only roadway clearance time. New York, California, and Connecticut have all been a rather substantial progress in planning for implementing a comprehensive program. They have done varying degrees of roadway clearance. Let me back a for a minute. They are developing, planning, or obtaining. They're all moving ahead. They are not yet doing the performance measurement. They are making substantial progress toward actually doing performance measurement. Washington State has some exchange. This is geared toward a 511 webpage to get information out to the public. Washington State is doing some collection and analysis of data, but it is not yet operated. I am sure this is something that many states are facing. Utah has 15 or 20 number-one priority is that the agencies are working on. They recognize the importance of implementing performance measurement. The good news is that Utah Highway Patrol apparently is going to be implementing a new CAD system. Maryland is also a measuring performance, but they don't have the Interagency Data Exchange. Maryland State Police are looking at obtaining a system. There is hope that that might happen. Texas has a number of institutional and legislative statutes that have implemented performance measurement programs. Some are problematic. It really deals with our responsibility is assigned for reporting incidents. They have a well established incident response program, but it is my understanding any time that you have an incident reported to the local police which will in turn notified other agencies. So the problem is you just have multiple agencies involved in an incident response, and getting all of the agencies together to work on performance is problematic just because there is a huge number of local and state jurisdictions involved. The good news is all states are integrating performance measurement. It does appear that the whole idea of a TIM program and an integrated TIM program is moving ahead pretty well. Last but not least, these are some ideas identified on how FHWA can support program level TIM performance measurement. The other one was funding which vote recognize can be an issue. There are a number of very innovative suggestions that were made. The last one was developing a national system. Right now are a lot of states have to go through and do their own integrations to be able to facilitate the exchange. One suggestion was, is there any way FHWA can develop a national system that the states could simply interface into rather than leaving it to a s tate-by-state function? This with the data exchange could be documented all the way through. What are the steps involved? What are the institutions and barriers? There seems to be a lot of support for continuing the state initiatives. They like the opportunity to meet with peers. Somebody wanted to develop a website where people could post information. You would have some virtual exchange of information. We refer to it here as a community practice. It is just an opportunity to exchange information on lessons learned. When a project gets as what support as developing some type of a national system, you must continue to promote a common language and standards. I think the states recognize that even within a state each agency may define differently how they measure the duration of an incident and things like that. That completes the overview of the focus state initiative. Thank you very much, and I appreciate the opportunity to make this presentation. We now have a couple of presentations from the states Florida and Wisconsin. The first one will be from the state of Florida. And it will be on Florida ITS and TIM performance measurements. Anita has 18 years of the transportation engineering and planning. She has extensive knowledge of national, state wide and metropolitan data and planning programs. She is the director of the Florida office for the last six years. Prior to this she was the manager of the central statistics office for the Florida department of transportation. She has been managing a project for Florida DOT and developed performance measures for the last 10 years. Thank you for the opportunity to talk about we have been doing in Florida. I would like to go over some of the policies and programs that Florida has in place with respect to TIM. And also review both ITS and TIM measures. Finally, I will end with a summary of the lessons learned here in Florida. Some of the policies and programs that we have in place include an open-road policy. We have several TIM teams that operate around the state. We have a broad range are program and also a rapid instant response program. I would like to go through each of these in a little bit of detail. This was put in place in 2002, and both agencies agreed that all incidents would be cleared from the roadway within 90 minutes. We had a lot of success working with FHWA and states to collect the data we need to report on. Second we have a program that brings together all agencies of all the including law enforcement. The TIM program works to reduce time and reopen traffic lanes. The first we have in place is to look after detection and response. The second deals with clearance of traffic incidents. [ indiscernible ]. The fourth is a training team. So again all of these teams have representatives from various agencies and meet on a regular basis with the state and around the state. Our third program is Road Rangers, which is a free highway assistance. I have some measures coming upon this. We currently have over 100 vehicles covering 1200 miles of Florida interstate. The fourth program is our roadway instant scene clearance which is an innovative incentive grant. This is kind of an incentive program and has been successful. We have some results that we have been tracking with results to our risks. This slide here shows over the last three years the number of responses we have had, the arrival, and the ninety minute clearance time.