Dive Brief:
-
The Washington, DC Department of Transportation launched the District Mobility Project and companion website offering a regional view of surface transportation performance, according to Equipment World.
-
The website visualizes transportation data for walking, bicycling, mass transit and vehicle traffic to educate locals and to help inform DDOT’s infrastructure investment priorities.
- Multimodal transportation analysis is intended to help reduce the region’s traffic congestion by highlighting high-congestion areas with poor accessibility for further development or simply to help passengers avoid already crowded areas.
Dive Insight:
State (and district) DOTs continue to up their game with the adoption of construction technologies for data analytics, visualization, field repair and research of internet-enabled sensors and autonomous vehicles. In December 2016, the Ohio DOT announced a $15 million project to create a 35-mile smart highway test bed along Interstate 33, while the Minnesota and North Carolina DOTs are launching drone sorties to perform bridge inspections and assist with emergency-response efforts.
The national transportation agency warned as early as mid-2015 that roads in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Washington and Wisconsin are in poor to mediocre shape. Additionally, a recent report from the American Road and Transportation Builders Association noted that 9% of U.S. bridges were structurally deficient in 2016, down slightly from the prior year but nonetheless boasting a $700 billion price tag to fix.
The District’s mobility project seeks to identify and prioritize opportunities for improvements to similar road disrepair issues by analyzing multimodal travel time indices charting the ratio of average travel time in congestion to the time required to make the same trip at free-flow speeds. And as an added bonus, it provides a visually compelling, map-based interface for geeking out over how many people use the system's 3,056 individual bus stops each day.
