Design and Implementation of PennDOT’s Road Condition Reporting System (RCRS)

CLIENT: Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT)
LOCATION: Pennsylvania

“RCRS has become PennDOT’s standard incident reporting tool for ensuring safety and well-being for drivers in Pennsylvania.”

— Doug Tomlinson, Incident Management Section Manager, PennDOT

With RCRS, PennDOT can put valuable information about road conditions in the hands of users and PennDOT employees so they can make informed decisions, whether it helps them to plan safer travel routes, avoid delays, or allocate resources to manage current and future adverse weather conditions.

One of the key features of RCRS is its ability to depict or display closure and condition locations. To identify a closure, users can input a variety of indicators, such as a street intersection (non-interstates), milepost (interstates), exit (interstates), intersecting traffic route, route segment, or by simply locating the closure on a map.

Once a closure or condition is entered, the map viewer in RCRS displays the road (interstate, state route, etc.) in an identifying color, and users can click on specific roads or counties for more detailed information, such as an exit number, route, and name.

RCRS depicts winter road conditions (icy, snow-covered, wet) on interstates and limited-access highways, arming travelers with the information to make decisions that help to ensure their travel safety.

CHALLENGE

One minor closure of Pennsylvania’s vast roadway network can result in lost dollars and unnecessary stress for everyone involved. Historically, it used a labor-intensive process employing spreadsheets, but the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) needed a more efficient system that would effectively communicate road closures, conditions, and roadway incidents to PennDOT engineering districts, the public, and coordinating agencies.

SOLUTION

GeoDecisions developed the web-based Road Condition Reporting System (RCRS) for PennDOT to ensure consistency and accuracy when reporting road closure and road condition information on state highways. RCRS helps to capture important information, such as the road closure beginning and ending points, and the estimated time when the road will be reopened.

The RCRS has revolutionized the way PennDOT communicates road condition information. Many organizations depend on PennDOT to provide information on the status of roadways throughout the state. RCRS helps to streamline the process, improve accuracy, visualize the current state of the roadway network via GIS, expand reporting capabilities, and ensure consistency of the data provided.

Used by all PennDOT engineering districts, RCRS is designed to store information on a wide variety of conditions, including weather-related road surface conditions, construction, and maintenance work, traffic incidents, and road closures. Personnel throughout PennDOT regularly enter condition information into RCRS, which provides the data for PennDOT’s Advanced Traffic Monitoring System (ATMS); 511PA; the public traveler information page on PennDOT.com; and notifications to executives and appropriate staff at PennDOT and partnering agencies. Armed with this information, travelers can make the best decisions when planning their routes and determining travel time. Likewise, law enforcement and emergency response agencies rely on the information in RCRS to establish the quickest and most direct route when responding to an incident or event.

KEY TECHNOLOGY

• ASP.NET

• JavaScript and TypeScript

• Esri ArcGIS Enterprise

• Oracle Spatial

• Business Objects