Message From the Executive Director

By Dennis Motiani

Download PDF

On behalf of Chairman Shailen Bhatt, the entire NOCoE Board of Directors, the three associations, AASHTO, ITE and ITS America, let me first begin by offering our deepest gratitude to Deputy Executive Director of TxDOT, Mr. John Barton, who served the NOCoE Board of Directors with great vigor and enthusiasm. Mr. Barton the TSM&O champion in Texas and across the nation served TxDOT for about 30 years. He will be missed at TxDOT and on the NOCoE Board. We wish him the best as he pursues another career.

ITE held its annual meeting in Hollywood, Florida. It offered some excellent opportunities to share NOCoE’s purpose, vision and benefits with various ITE councils. NOCoE will be working with many of these councils to find common services. As an example, ITE’s TSM&O council is planning to co-host a one day ICM training during ITE’s technical conference in Tucson, Arizona in October.

In August, the Center offered two of the six CMM series webinars along with a webinar developed by AASHTO’s subcommittee on TSM&O which focused on data availability, integration and warehousing for performance measures. The Center also co-hosted a webinar on connected vehicles with TRB. All the webinars were well-attended and received positive feedback. The plan showing various technical services offered by NOCoE was submitted to AASHTO. Please take few minutes to review the services and as usual I welcome your comments and feedback. I also wanted to share with you an excellent study done by Iowa DOT on 511 as well as the Seattle Traffic Incident Management Report and TIM Best Practices Memo.

For the first time, the Center will create a video webinar so you can not only hear the speakers but also see them. Previous Chairman of the NOCoE Board and former Executive Director of Colorado DOT Don Hunt, will moderate this webinar. Utah DOT Executive Director Carlos Braceras and Director Malcolm Dougherty of CALTRANS, along with key staff, will share some of the TSM&O best practices in these two progressive states, where TSM&O is taking center stage. They will also share their views on the challenges they have faced or are still facing, in moving the program ahead and developing this unique workforce.

I am very excited about the two regional peer exchanges that the Center is working on. One for the Northwest states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Northern California, and the second regional peer exchange for the Northeast states of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut and Rhode Island. The intent is to bring together regional TSM&O partners to discuss regional needs, share practices, seek solutions and learn through peer dialogue; subject matter experts may also be invited.

I also wanted to report to you on the national summit. The NOCoE board, AASHTO’s subcommittee on TSM&O and the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) have all agreed to discuss the workforce issue at the national summit. The summit tentatively is scheduled for spring of 2016. Some senior members of the TSM&O community, along with the TAC will meet during the AASHTO annual meeting to better define the expectations and outcomes from this summit. Progress will be shared with the TSM&O community through a webinar and a meeting/session at the TRB. Stay tuned. Please let me know if you would like to be involved or have input in this interesting and complex topic.

Planning and Operations folks are working more closely than ever before. To that extent, we are trying to offer transportation planners a platform to share information and engage in a dialogue with operations engineers. You will notice a more robust exchange between planners in our discussion forum under “Planning for Operations” and more on this subject in the newsletter as we move forward. If you know of other planners who have not yet registered or have not used NOCoE’s website, I urge you to send them to transportationops.org so that they may become involved.

Forward Focus on Operations
By Paul Trombino, Executive Director, Iowa Department of Transportation

With more than 114,000 miles of roadway and 25,000 bridges in the state of Iowa, the days of significantly expanding the transportation network are behind us.  As we seek to maximize every transportation dollar, we envision a smaller transportation system where travelers and goods move seamlessly among modes with more choices and better levels of service. Rooting prioritized investments in performance management, asset management, and operations will be keys to advancing this shift. In Iowa, we saw 321 fatalities in 2014, as well as over 800 traffic incidents per month. We believe this to be 321 fatalities too many, which is why we have adopted the goal of “Zero Fatalities.” To read more, please click here.  

Measuring Safety Performance for the Federal Government and Your Own Agency
By Heather Rothenburg, PhD
Director of Policy and Federal Projects

Historically, measuring the number of fatalities from one year to the next has been the most commonly used safety performance measure. The availability of a standardized national dataset National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System allows federal, state, regional, and local transportation agencies to track a common safety measure from a single data source. More recently, transportation agencies have expanded the idea of measuring safety performance to include a measure of exposure (usually vehicle miles traveled), serious injuries, and even more specific measures at the state or local level. Safety impacts mobility not only in terms of the people immediately involved in the crash, but congestion and secondary crashes related to that primary incident. It may even impact how road users make decisions about where, when, and how they travel. To read more, please click here.

AZTech Regional Information System

Congratulations to Maricopa County Department of Transportation (MCDOT), Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) and OZ Engineering, LLC on receiving the ITE Transportation System Management and Operations Council Achievement Award for a Project or Organization. Mr. Faisal Saleem accepted the award on behalf of MCDOT, the lead agency.

The AZTech Regional Information System (ARIS) is a regional ITS tool that provides real-time incident notification and intelligently assimilates incident-centric traffic information in support of traffic management during an incident.  The ARIS system has been designed based on the needs of local jurisdictions who demand timely notification of incidents as they occur in their respective jurisdiction. In addition, upon notification, ARIS automatically assimilates a range of useful information related to the particular incident and presents the information in a web-based “tactical screen.” To read more, please click here.

UDOT Citizen Reporter Program

Lisa Miller, Traveler Information Manager, UDOT and Robert Clayton, Director, Traffic Operations Center, UDOT were winners in the Best New Innovative Practice/Rural Deployment category at the Best of ITS 2014 with their Citizen Reporter Program submission. Miller and Clayton offered the following insight into the program: The UDOT Citizen Reporting Program enlists volunteers to report on current road conditions along specific roadway segments across Utah. The volunteers can be UDOT employees, law enforcement, truck drivers, plow drivers or commuters. The long term goal of adding Citizen Reporters to UDOT’s weather operations road reporting is to supplement current condition reporting on segments where drivers are already traveling. To read more, please click here.

USDOT Releases Six New Mobility Reports

The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) announced that the following mobility application reports have been posted in the National Transportation Library.

• Impact Assessment of Incident Scene Work Zone Alerts for Drivers and Workers (INC-ZONE) and Incident Scene Pre-Arrival Staging Guidance for Emergency Responders (RESP-STG)
• Emergency Communications for Evacuation (EVAC) in New Orleans Impact Assessment Report
• Freight Advanced Traveler Information System (FRATIS) - Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) Prototype Final Report

To view more report links and to read the full news release, please click here.

Call for Abstracts NATMEC: Improving Traffic Data Collection, Analysis, and Use 2016
TRB is sponsoring NATMEC: Improving Traffic Data Collection, Analysis, and Use on May 1-4, 2016 in Miami, Florida. Submit abstracts by September 10, 2015. The conference is designed to advance the state of the practice of travel monitoring by providing a mechanism for improving the interaction between system operators, data collection program managers, and the various staff that collect, process, and utilize that data.

Register with NOCoE and Join the Discussion Forum!  

We hope you will find the NOCoE (http://www.transportationops.org) to be a place where you can share information as well as receive it – we encourage you register and share in our discussion forum your latest work plan, specific challenge you are facing with operations practice or a new technology, and techniques you’ve used to empower your staff. This is YOUR transportation operations resource and we are interested in your feedback to continually improve our portfolio of services. Please feel free to contact the Center with your suggestions, either through the website or at dmotiani@transportationops.org.