Welcome to the Travel Time Messages on Dynamic Message Signs. My name is Jocelyn Bauer and I will be giving a brief introduction before turning this over to Bob Ruppert who we are pleases to have as our moderator for today's seminar. Please be add sized that today's seminar is being recorded. I'd like to go over a few logistical details. Today's seminar will last before 90 minutes. If you have a question, type in the question on the lower right-hand corner of your screen. Indicate who the question is intended for. Please make sure you are taping into the syntax box and not the large white area. Make sure you send your question to all participants rather than just the host or the speaker. Presenters will be unable to answer your questions during our presentation, but some of the questions typed into the chat box will be used for the question/answer session for the last 30 minutes of the seminar. 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At this time I would like to introduce Bob Ruppert, the moderator of today's webcast. He's the team leader in the operations office of transportation management in the headquarters of U.S. Federal Highway Administration in Washington, D.C., as such, Mr. Ruppert manages the travel information program and services the 511 for federal high way. Mr. Ruppert also serves as the technical program coordinator for the office. Previously, Mr. Ruppert was the project manager for the Traffic Test in Orlando, Florida as well as program manager for several other IPS projects dealing with traveler information. He's been with federal highway since 1987, following turns with traffic systems installation contractor and the Virginia department of transportation. Mr. Ruppert is a civil engineering graduate of Washington university in St. Louis, Missouri. He's a member of the institute of engineers and the intelligent transportation society of America, ITS America. Now, I'll turn things over to Bob Ruppert who will introduce our first speaker. Thank you, Jocelyn. Good morning, or good afternoon, I'd like to welcome you to the talking operations web conference on a topic we think is very interesting at federal highways and we're seeing a big trend toward getting better information out to people and better use of dynamic message signs. We have three excellent presentations today, with a lot of good information. Hopefully you'll ask good questions, again, just enter those in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen and we'll try to capture them and use them at the end of the presentation. Our first presenter today is Kelly Langer. She's the freeway operations supervisor for the Department of Transportation; she's also responsible for leading development of traffic plans and other information service projects. She's been with the Wisconsin dot since 2000, and prior to holding this position she was the project manager in project designer for the Wisconsin department of transportation. In that role, she was responsible for coordination of highway prongs and coordination projects with other units, specifications and estimates. Miss Langer received her bachelors in civil engineers from the university of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Kelly. You're free to take it away when you're ready, Kelly. Kelly, you may have it on mute, you may want to unmute it. Am I back in the call? Yes, you are live on the call, ma'am. For those of you who can hear us, we're actually experiencing some technical difficulties but we're attempting to get our presenter back on the line. Hopefully she'll be with us shortly 23 you can hang on for a few moments. Kelly, you may proceed. Hello? Kelly, are you there? I'm sorry about that the phone went dead. We're ready for you whenever you'd like to start. My name is Kelly Langer, I manage the freeway operations center for the Wisconsin department of transportation. And currently I'm going to give you a little overview of the area of Milwaukee. And Southeast Wisconsin where we currently have the focus of our variable message signs. We also have facilities in Madison, but currently we're not displaying travel times on those variable message signs. The city of Milwaukee has a population of about 700,000. WYCHI county itself has about a million people. We have several heavily travelled core cores in and out of the city. PowerPoint gives you an idea of the location. We're right along lake Michigan and the location of Milwaukee with respect to the rest of Wisconsin. The traffic management center for Wisconsin currently in the Milwaukee area, we have 36 dynamic message boards on the freeway and arterials. We have about 125 ramp meters in the Milwaukee area. And we have about 100 cameras in this area. We just recently in June went from more of a 9 to 5 kind of operation to a 24-7 facility. We are operating 24-7 at this point. We also have the capability and access to the highway advisory radio system where we actually have a pretty extensive system in this area. Have linked up all of our different devices, so we can broadcast throughout the region with one message on all the highway advisory radios. We also have a pretty strong partnership with the media. And in this area that we found valuable in getting the word out regarding traffic management. We have a program in Wisconsin called the time program. It's our traffic incident management enhancement program. Currently we have bimonthly meetings, where we invite different partners from law enforcement and emergency services along with the toll operators and people interested in traffic incident management to come to the table and talk about issues relevant to them. This time program has different sub committees, currently we have several different sub committees, special events. Incident management, traffic management, where we're talking mainly about alternate route planning, we also have an outreach and a public information subcommittee under the time program. And ITS allows the recorder to be viewed and operated as a single entity which aids in managing our congestion. We found that traffic incident management, especially in Wisconsin is more about the partnership building than about the technology. So we try to incorporate the technology into our time program, but try to focus on building partnerships and solving the problems at a low cost, in a low cost way. Just to give you a little bit of background on the use of dynamic message signs in Wisconsin, back in '93 a local reporter started reporting travel times via airplane. And that was kind of the start of travel time in this area, in '94 we started installing loop detectors to aid in calculating and producing the information necessary for travel times. And in 1995, that was when we actually started publishing on a limited basis travel times on DMS. We verified all of our routes and still do consistently, because we realize that getting information out to the motorists is a great thing, but it has to be reliable information. And information that they feel comfortable with. Back in the '90s, we were only using our VMS for travel times while the control room was open. And because we wanted the oversite, we wanted the capability to be able to pull down those travel times if we felt they weren't accurate. In '98 we improved the reliability by upgrading some of our computer equipment, and by '99 we added more DMS to our system and more travel times were included. We also started in '99 posting travel times to our website which people have been really positive about travel times out on the internet, and it's a really good tool to get out to the motorists. In 2000, we started feeling pretty comfortable with the information we had and how the information was being sent back to the DMS, so we started it displaying the travel times on a 24-7 basis. And of course we continue to monitor the travel times and whenever there's a problem, and I'll talk a little bit more about our reliability in a minute. We only display when we feel comfortable with the information. In 2004 we started time of day travel times which means that we changed the travel times based on for instance for a commuter who was very comfortable with a particular route which happens during our peek periods a.m. and p.m. peak periods, we display a certain type of travel time, where as the rest of the day we might be focusing more on people that aren't commuters that are not as familiar with the area, and some signs are changed based on time of day. The different uses for our dynamic message signs, obviously travel times as we're talking about today. We use them extensively for incidents and Amber alert is another activity. We use them for special event planning and operations during special events and congestion information which goes along with the incidents in the travel time. This slide illustrates a little bit about how our travel times are calculated. We have in pavement detection and in the urban area and Milwaukee area, we have about a quarter mile spacing. Rural areas are further apart up to 2 miles, that information has been collected. The inpavement collection is detected in the field and it's sent back to the traffic operations center and then the travel time is calculated average speedy voided by known distance. And they can insert travel times. The variable message signs are dynamic message signs are updated every 60 seconds, our website is updated every 30 minutes. We feel that every 60 seconds is a pretty good time frame. If we're doing it any sooner it changes the message too often. Much beyond that, especially during peek periods it can be pretty variable. So we want to give as accurate information as possible. All corridors in Milwaukee have at least one travel time, we have four inbound five outbound corridors. Choosing our different travel times we use a process where we choose them by interchanges or by major cross streets that we have significant static signing where people would actually be able to follow if they had a map where that travel time ends, and obviously it begins at the sign. Currently we have no data from probe vehicles, we use detectors and limited amount of micro wave detection. This is the bottom half of the slide illustrates our web site, which we actually put out to the second whereas on the variable message side we're out to the minute. And we round up. Travel times will not display, this is an important element about reliability. 33% of the links are invalid. So we require that amount of accuracy in order to put the information out. And out on the internet as I said, it worked to the second and on the signs we're only average to the minute. Now, the travel time distance, the more accurate it is, this is instinctive in that there's less variables when the shorter the distance. There's less congestion, there's less incidents. As the links and the distances get longer, the accuracy is reduced. And we have a set 10 minutes for our server to be able to pulled information. If the travel time is not accurate. And we think the system operates pretty efficiently in that it will automatically pull the information and blank out the sign or go to a different message if we are using for either congestion or special event or incident management. 66% of the detectors have to be reporting data, at least one out of three lanes could not be working, and we can still use the other two. Data extractor is a tool we developed some years back when we realized that we didn't know how accurate the information coming back to our center was. And we had some questions on if our data was good data. And we developed a tool where we can pull the data, put it into this piece of software and we can retrieve it for a lot of different reasons, for reporting purposes, for retiming our ramp meters and for deciding if the information is going out to the variable message sign is good data. And it's been a very valuable tool. I want to talk a little bit about travel times, we've heard from different states that they've been reluctant to, based on accuracy -- I think that's another one of our obstacles that we have to continue to overcome. We have someone drive our routes once a month, not all of the routes, but we randomly choose different routes and we have him drive them. We're pretty close to within a minute on our routes. I think the highest we ever go as far as the total time is 2 minutes. And so we continue to have that person check the accuracy, we realize that's very, very important. We try to get consensus to what people want on the variable message signs, we hear comments constantly coming back, why don't you post my travel time? Well, we want to and we try to did what makes sense. Any time we get an inquiry, we try to talk about it and decide, does it make more sense to change the travel time to that location and make changes constantly to the different routes. We want meaningful travel times and another obstacle is basically what sits on the signs and often times there's better ideas on routes, but the information or the wording or that particular crossroad is too long to fit on the message board. Once again, and I know I've said this several times, but confidence in reliability of the knelt work and software were allowing messages to be displayed. Constant oversite. We have to keep checking those to make sure we have verification of good data. We never had a formal campaign when we introduced travel times to the public and to the media. We have received a lot of really good feedback. In the lower right-hand corner, the travel times help me determine which route to take. When I get to the interchange if both routes are backed up, I can exit. We give them a choice, we'll show them on the variable message sign two different alternatives to getting to a location. And he can make his determination. Maybe one of those is even to get off the freeway. So we try to give the most information that we have available. We never really have done any formal study on this, have only heard positive things. Again, both about the website and about posting travel times. Future plans for our travel times, and this is more of a current thing happening within the last month. We are posting travel times on our highway advisory radio. You see that in some other cities, kind of a text to voice deal where we chose several different routes in those corridors and people have access to the highway advisory radio and can check that. It's another tool in addition to the dynamic message boards to be able to gain information. We're still in the testing phase of that at this point. But we think it's another really helpful tool. Just some facts about our travel times in Milwaukee. Our longest travel time is about 20 minutes in free flow traffic and our shortest one is about 6 minutes. Anything short of six minutes is maybe not even worth putting up there. I think that's kind of what we see. Anything beyond 20 minutes, there's probably too many factors and too long of a time for people to even remember what it said by the time they get there. Those aren't hard and fast rules, but they're pretty close to where we want to stay. And again, 33 dynamic message boards and arterial dynamic message boards. 36 signs, and website. Another great link that I talked about earlier where we can get the public involved. We think dynamic message times in Wisconsin have been a great thing. We've heard wonderful feedback about it. But it's not easy. It's not a system that can be left without constant oversight and constant operation. And it takes some resources. We feel there are resources and the time is well spent. And we're going to continue to do it. And we continue to change it based on feedback from other states and feedback from the public and from the media. So I feel real positive about what we're doing in Wisconsin. And we're going to continue on with the program. With that, I guess I'll turn it back over to Bob? Yep. Okay. Great. Thank you, Kelly. Excellent. Getting a lot of good questions in here, so I think we'll have good discussion at the end. Our next presenter, today is going to be Mr. Roger strain, responsible for the design and development of the software in use in San Antonio. In addition to several other efforts, he's also performed design and development work for traffic management centers across Texas and Florida. Roger? Thank you, Bob. Good morning, and good afternoon to all of you out there. I'm glad you're able to join in with us. As was said, my name is Roger Strain. My first involvement was doing the travel time system. I have a pretty thorough understanding of the technical background and how the system actually works in San Antonio. I may not be able to bring the same sort of governmental oversite views that some of the other presenters here today can, but the more technical questions, I would be happy to dress. Let's go ahead and start looking at trans guide itself. Trans guide was deployed in the late '90s. They worked on getting a database with travel speeds and travel time as cross the city. This is drawn from a couple different sources of data. Not only the assumed and segments of the freeway, where we have loop detectors and that sort of device. But also arterial streets based on incidents and lane closures and experimental speeds that were calculated. A lot that have data is not used so much now, but trans guide was thinking about travel times at that point. A little more direct involvement was with the IBM. This involves putting units in the cars that travel around the city to be able to provide route guidance and incident updates. Data was sent to those using radio transmission and also the units themselves would feedback travel times to the trans guide center to allow us to see how fast cars were going and calculate the times. One of the options, I want to get from this place to this place is shortest time based on those current travel times. Unfortunately, as the project winds down, the units that were actually being use, manufactured by Alpine were no longer made.