01478412

Component

Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) systems are helping Departments of Transportation (DOTs) achieve a variety of new efficiencies while improving or maintaining level of service (LOS) through periods of state budget shortfalls. The trucking, emergency response, and transit communities have used GPS/AVL for years. Now DOTs are realizing new efficiencies with this technology as well. Recent findings on the challenges and cost-benefit advantages DOTs are finding with these technologies are discussed in this paper, summarizing the author’s 2011 and 2012 surveys of DOTs on this topic. For example, in addition to the 10% materials savings that DOTs in the US and Canada have reported, automated data collection associated with GPS/AVL is saving DOT maintenance forces thousands of hours filling out paperwork, boosting morale as well as effectiveness. Washington State (WS) DOT estimated the agency and the public benefit from an additional 10,000 hours per year that maintenance employees are out plowing instead of filling out paperwork, equating to a biennial savings of $700,000 in labor costs. The savings they found were such that WSDOT now aims to have all winter material application records, and material inventory issues recorded automatically, and the agency will begin to use their GPS/AVL equipment to help automate documentation of the maintenance staff performs on the state’s permanent stormwater control structures in the right-of-way, associating hours worked with GPS located stormwater facilities, to better understand life cycle costs, maintenance requirements, and document and communicate maintenance needs to the state legislature, for better funding.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHD60 Maintenance Equipment.

01470560

13-5123

English

12p

2013

Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

References

Automatic data collection systems; Automatic vehicle location; Benefit cost analysis; Cost effectiveness; Global Positioning System; Level of service; Maintenance; Savings

Washington State Department of Transportation

Washington (State)

Data and Information Technology; Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; Vehicles and Equipment; I60: Maintenance; I90: Vehicles

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2013 Paper #13-5123

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Feb 5 2013 12:58PM