Craig Austin >> Welcome everybody to today's T3 session on "ITS Decisionmakers' Resources." I am Craig Austin, the T3 Administrator. With us is the host, Joseph Peters, who is part of the ITS Joint Program Office. Our presenters are Rob Maccubbin, of Mitretek Systems, Barbara Staples of Mitretek Systems, Steve Gordon of Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and Firoz Kabir of Mitretek Systems. Joe?
Joseph Peters >> Thanks, Craig. It's my pleasure to be here today to share with you some of the resources we have available that have come together over a decade of data collection. I would like to turn your attention to the ITS Joint Program Office web site at www.its.dot.gov. With that Craig, you can pull up that screen.
Peters >> This is the ITS Joint Program Office home page. I'll give you a quick tour of this site. We'll go counter clockwise starting at the top left. You will see that — available is an overview of "What is ITS." "ITS in My State" is something to go and view any state in the union. You can get information about Tennessee on the benefits, costs, how much is out there, and lessons learned that originated from the state of Tennessee. Our presenters will talk more about how we answer those types of questions.
Peters >> There's focus areas about major initiatives going on in the Joint Program Office, of exploratory issues and other activities, the foundational framework of architectural standards and telecommunications.
Peters >> As we curse down, you will see Deployment Support. This is the area we are spending a lot of time, today, on Deployment Statistics, Benefits Database, Cost Database, Lessons Learned. We have a learning center in the works, it will be coined a "Solutions Center." This is the current view of the learning center, which is the ITS Professional Capacity Building Program, under major revamp, and we are expecting a new version of the learning center, as the "Solutions Center," coming up within the next several months.
Peters >> As we turn counterclockwise again, I go to the bottom left, Technical Assistance Resources. At the top of the list, ITS Resource Guide. We have this in print — many people are aware of the existence of this. They may not be aware of the fact that it's available online. You click that button, and then you have the ability to search on the colored buttons to get to the resources.
Peters >> You can also see an evaluation site. This gives you information on how to do independent evaluations, definitions, and guidelines.
Peters >> As we turn the corner, counter clockwise, you see the "ITS Decisionmaking Resources" features a web site on ITS Deployment Analysis System, a tool to do benefit cost analysis. You will see links to other U.S. DOT program activities on modal administration websites from our web page. Coming to the top, the "Current News" items are there, with "Lesson of the Month" and "Benefit of the Month." And at the very top, you will see an index of more resources available. I would like to point your attention to our "Library," an extensive library in existence for 10 years, an electronic library that contains many of the documents and reports that contribute to the resources we have. Coming full circle, to the "Applications Overview." We'll spend the majority of our time remaining in this session in the "Applications Overview" area. So, I clicked "Applications Overview." And, you can see that we talk about ITS applications in the form of "Intelligent Infrastructure," listed at top, and its subcomponents. As I page down, you can see that we also have "Intelligent Vehicles" at the bottom and their subcomponents. And you can go into any of these component areas and get full information about benefits, costs, lessons learned. Scrolling to the top of the page, since incident management is a very popular topic, we will focus on an example of incident management. Click on "Incident Management" icon, and you see, here, is a graphical representation of how we look at incident management systems and the subsystems and subapplications of incident management systems that we divided our interest into. "Surveillance and Detection" is a yellow box, and it is broken down into subcategories pertaining to "Detectors," "Imaging video," "Wireless E911," etc. "Mobilization and Response" is another area — I will scroll down — It includes "AVL/CAD," "Response Routing" and "Motorist Assistance Patrols." For the purpose of our presentation, today, because of the vast popularity of this topic, we will focus on Motorist Assistance Patrols. Before that, I want to go to the top and talk about the fact that you can talk about incident management systems at a higher level, which is the green bar at the top. If I click on that, you get a definition of what incident management systems are, and a feature at this level only, is the question of how do we integrate incident management systems with other components of ITS. I click on that, and a box appears with several columns in it. This shows you what various components contribute to Incident Management. The "Incident Management" icon is the center row [column] in this chart. The very first row is "Arterial Management Systems" — can contribute to "Incident Management Systems," and the box between them says that 'Hey, we can provide arterial traffic condition information to incident managers.' If you click on this box, a window pops up and gives you a definition of how that integrates — arterial traffic conditions are provided to incident management systems. It uses information to identify incidents and manage incident response on arterial systems. You can click on a tab saying, hey, I would like to see instances in the country of when you can do incident management. If you click on here to see pertinent 2004 deployment data, you come up with a screen ...
Steve Gordon >> You might mention that this offers the ability to get to the deployment data.
Peters >> Yeah. Then we will click back to "Applications Overview," go into "Motorist Assistance Patrols," through "Incident Management."
Peters >> You can see what's provided here is a definition of "Motorist Assistance Patrols," and under it, a series of questions can be answered. We will go through some of the first resources at the top and quickly review the resources presented by the questions at the end.
Peters >> So, what are the benefits of motorist assistance patrols? If you click on this, you'll link to the Benefits Database. That link gives you specifically the resources available to address specifically "Motorist Assistance Patrols." With that, I will turn the podium over to Rob Maccubbin, Lead Transportation Engineer at Mitretek Systems, and Rob manages the Benefits Database. With that, Rob, help us out, and talk more about the resources you can provide in the Benefits Database.
Rob Maccubbin >> Sure thing, thank you, Joe. What you are seeing on this screen is a selection of documents made available through the ITS Benefits Database web site having to do with Motorist Assistance Patrols. Briefly, what the ITS Benefits Database strives to do is provide quick and easy access to summary information discussing evaluations of deployed ITS systems around the U.S. and the world. Posted on our website are short summaries of those evaluation documents which focus in on the quantitative impacts identified in those summary evaluations. I will scroll down a little, and show you an example of one of those entries.
Maccubbin >> The last link you see is titled "Advanced Transportation Management System Elemental Cost Benefits Assessment." This is one example of a report that we post. We click on the link, and you again see the title of the report; the authors are mentioned, this example happens to be deployed in a metropolitan area. And, as we know from links that Joe clicked on, this report contains information on motorist assistance patrols and the impact those can have on transportation operations.
Maccubbin >> We include with each summary some context information on the project that was deployed, the evaluation conducted of that project, and a short synopsis of the quantitative impact of that ITS application. So, in this case, under the Incident Management Team, which is the Utah Department of Transportation moniker for a Motorist Assistance Patrol, you can see that the study area was three major interstates in the Salt Lake City area, accounting for about 77 percent of the incidents that their program responded to. In this case, it was a straightforward analysis of the data that they collected to determine what the impact of that program on incident duration was — frequency over the time period of this study did decrease the incident duration by about 20 minutes per incident, on average. So, that's an example of the quantitative information that you will find throughout this database. As you scroll down, you will see for every database entry, we provide additional source information. Of course there will be background information for the study reviewed, the authors and title are mentioned, source information — this happens to be a report prepared for the Utah Department of Transportation, as well as U.S. D.O.T., the date of the study, the kind of evaluation that was conducted, in this case, it was measured — quantitative information that was measured as well as simulations that were performed on other applications studied. When the document is available online, we provide a hyperlink to that document. Lastly, I'll mention a couple of category links showing you the different types of data provided in this entry, and you can click to similar entries within the database, for example, other examples of Motorist Assistance Patrols that you can see in that second link. The ITS goal areas discussed in this entry deal with mobility impact of ITS — I mentioned the duration of incidents was reduced which has obvious impact on traveler delay and mobility, which is why the mobility goal area is highlighted, and has other key words having to do with this summary. That's a short overview of what every entry on the Benefits Database looks like.
Maccubbin >> I'm now clicking on the "Benefits Database" homepage link and just give you an overview of the website and how you can access information within it. You see listed in the center of the page the various ITS application areas. These are the same application areas in the "Applications Overview," which Joe just has gone over with you. I will click quickly into the incident management area and show that you see a similar structure to that application overview, with highlights from entries in the Benefits Database drawn out, quick and easy sound bites on what the benefits of incident management systems can be. Scrolling down the page you see similar categories to the ones that Joe clicked though. And scrolling down to the Motorist Assistance Patrol area, you see the same summary we saw from Utah, just to show the other means of accessing that same report. I will scroll back up, click to the homepage once again, to demonstrate the next means for accessing the benefits information, and that is by the Goal Area. I briefly talked about the mobility goal area, which was the topic covered in the Utah evaluation. There are five others discussed in the ITS Benefits Database: customer satisfaction, efficiency — having to do with capacity and throughput improvements on the transportation infrastructure due to ITS — energy and environmental impact — emissions, fuel savings, those impacts from ITS, mobility — delay in travel time, productivity — cost savings to transportation agencies, or transportation operators, or Travellers in some cases. I will click into "Safety" to show you what one of these views of the Benefits Database information looks like. Again, it's a list of reports covered in the database, and there's quite a few in the case of safety impact. So, each of these examples includes an impact on transportation safety. Clicking into any of those links will provide a summary similar to what you saw in the Utah example. We have information from 39 of the 50 states at the moment, and you can access any state of interest to you. It's an international database; we review reports from overseas, and summarize findings from those evaluations, in this web site, as well. We have information from about 19 countries, available on the website.
Maccubbin >> Like many websites we have a "What's-New" page, which is the place to go to check recent postings. We list titles of recent reports, and sometimes have a different announcement for other information available on the website. The current announcement has to do with a separate document related to the Benefits Database activities, and the place to go for such documents related to Benefits Database development includes a variety of printed publications that we put out. Our flagship report is at the top of the screen, published every two years, inventorying the various ITS applications, benefits, costs, and lessons learned that we are aware of. Our next report is coming out in 2007, and we will include information from the Deployment Statistics knowledge resource, as well. I will also mention that in the Cost Database web site, demonstrated next, there's a similar link to available documents where you can access related reports for that web site.
Maccubbin >> That concludes my review of the Benefits Database website, and I click back to the ITS "Applications Overview" and pass the mic back to you, Joe Peters.
Peters >> Thank you, Rob. The next step is we will go back to "Incident Management," to "Motorist Assistance Patrols."
Peters >> And, one of the features that I want to highlight is the opportunity to provide feedback on our web sites. You will see a yellow box on the left that says, "Tell us what you think" about this web site.
Peters >> Scrolling down, the next question on this list is, "What are the costs?" If you click that, you get all the cost information that we have about motorist assistance patrols. I'll let Barbara Staples talk to us about that. She's the Principal Engineer at Mitretek Systems and she's responsible for the Costs Database.
Barbara Staples >> Thank you, Joe. this page is showing cost data available related to Motorist Assistance Patrols. The cost database contains two types of cost data. First is unit cost or the costs of individual ITS elements, and links to that are at the top portion of this particular page. The second type of cost data is system cost, and that's more project-related costs, costs of different ITS deployments and links to cost summaries could be found here at the bottom portion of the page. Five are here, and I will click on this bottom link. That is going to take us to a report from Florida D.O.T., District 4, their 2005 Annual Report, a benefit cost analysis on the Sun Guide TMC. This is an example of a summary in the system cost database. There is some background information, at the top portion of the summary, so the user can get a feel for the systems and background, and we have the system cost box on the right portion of the page.
Staples >> I want to mention that each system cost summary is different, and the level of detail is going to depend on the source document. I want to mention this particular summary has detailed information, and I will page down, draw your attention to this table, in particular the second entry here, "Road Ranger," which is the name of the motorist assistance patrol in Florida D.O.T. For 2005, they estimate that the current operations are about 2.5 million [dollars]. You may wonder what you get for 2.5 million. I will page down to the second paragraph below the table and you can find more information. There are 11 different vehicles that patrol the area. These vehicles cover about 84 centerline miles on three major interstates in Broward County. In Florida D.O.T., the Road Ranger program is contracted out, and that includes leasing the vehicles. You can see this program is operated 24 hours a day, and here is a breakdown number of vehicles and the timeframe that they are in operation. The remainder of the summary goes into detail about cost data for the Sun Guide TMC. I will page down, and you will see similar structure that Rob went over for the Benefits Summary. There's source information; and, in this case, we have a link to the Florida report, because it's publicly available and you can click here and be directly linked to that.
Staples >> At the very bottom of the page, you can go directly to the unit cost database by clicking on the subsystems highlighted below.
Staples >> Okay, I am going to page up now and give you a brief overview of the cost database. The Home button on the top left takes us to the homepage for the cost database. There are several ways to get to the cost data: you can click on links in this left-most box here, unit costs, system costs on the right-most box. And there are other links very similar to what Joe showed you earlier. Today, I am going to use the left navigation bar. I want to show you, briefly, examples of the unit costs data that we have. Clicking on the unadjusted costs provide users with links to 21 different subsystems. I want to point out that the structure of the "Unit Cost Database" is very different from the "System Costs Database." It is based more on the national ITS architecture. The key is to think about where an ITS element will physically reside. Take, for example, you want cost information on dynamic message signs. The signs are providing information to the user, traveler, at the roadside. You click on this fourth link, "Roadside Information." That will present you with the different unit cost elements in this particular subsystem. Here's variable message signs. We have a low to high range for capital costs. We also have operation and maintenance costs, arranged from low to high. Then there's some description of the particular elements.
Staples >> I want to point out that you will see different cost years. I will highlight a couple of those. We account for the difference by adjusting the costs to a common year, currently 2004. If you are interested in looking at data adjusted to a certain level, you can click on adjusted costs, located on the left side. If you want information about indexes used to adjust the cost, you can click on this index link, here, to find out more detailed information.
Staples >> You can download the Unit Costs Database in an Excel or PDF version. The links I am showing right here.
Staples >> I will show you different ways to get system costs. I clicked on the "Application" button, and you are presented with a structure very similar to what Joe and Rob showed before. I will keep with "Incident Management" and select that link and show you that you see the same structure as the others.
Staples >> I will now page up and point out that, similar to the benefits data by state, currently, we have data from 35 states, and international data, predominantly from European countries. We also have "What's New," and the top part presents what's new for the Unit Costs Database, and the bottom portion provides the 10 most recent additions to the system cost database.
Staples >> Going to page down, so I can get to another link. For both Benefits and Costs Databases, we have a "Contribute Data" button. We are very interested in keeping the data fresh in the database, and welcome any additions that users might like to contribute. You can select this link. We ask you to provide us with your name, e-mail address, and you can easily click on this "Browse" button and attach any documents and provide that information to us.
Staples >> Please provide your e-mail address in case we need to get back with you if we have follow-up information. And, again, that's for the Benefits and for the Costs database.
Staples >> I am going to page up, and I am going to go back to the "Applications Overview" page. Joe, that's completing the tour of the cost database, and I will turn it back over to you.
Peters >> Thank you, Barbara. I would like to remind our watchers and listeners of the fact that this is a demonstration; that many of the data we show under "What's New" are dated. That's because this is a demonstration, and we hope that you to go to the active web site and obtain all the new information that's available. We click on "Incident Management," and go back to "Motorist Assistance," maintaining that theme, and we find out the next questions to get answered. And next on the list is, "How much is out there?" This gives specific information on what's out there, across the nation, pertaining to motorist assistance patrols. This particular view is arterial and freeway miles covered by service patrols. The leader for Deployment Statistics and State-of-the-Practice activities in gathering information is Steve Gordon, a member of the research staff at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and I will turn that over to Steve.
Gordon >> Thank you, Joe.
Gordon >> The information that I am about to show you was collected in 2004. We surveyed 108 cities and a total of 2300 agencies, both at the metropolitan level and statewide.
Gordon >> This first table shows both arterial and freeway information. The table is telling us that the city of Albany has service patrols both on arterials and freeways. About 4 percent of arterials have coverage with service patrols, and freeways are 8 times as much or 32 percent of coverage, which is pretty typical for cities.
Gordon >> I'm going now to the home page to demonstrate some ways of accessing the data and demonstrate some of its capabilities. You can access information through these links on the front and buttons on the side. I'm going to use the buttons on the side. The best way to get at the data is to start with the "Survey Results" button, and I'll click on that. What you see there is a set of icons over the top. There's twelve icons that cover broad areas of ITS elements for which we have data. The top six are associated with metropolitan areas, and the lower level is associated with state-wide and rural areas, with the exception of MPO, for which we have a separate MPO survey.
Gordon >> I'm selecting the "Freeway Management" icon, and that moves down to the freeway management section. You can see that there are a number of questions. We have, in fact, over 900 bits of data that are shown in these entries. I'll just show you one, here. Let's take a look at "ramp metering." Let's say that we are interested in how much is out there for ramp metering. This shows our basic table, a sort of standard table to show information. We show metropolitan areas, the state, information on the agencies surveyed, and coverage type information. This is our default view, showing information based on metropolitan areas, and they are in alphabetical order, so you see the city of Allentown has about 24 percent of the ramps with metering.
Gordon >> You might be interested in other kinds of views. Let's try a rolled up view. Let's take a look at the national summary. You can see that ramp metering was reported in only 23 of the 100 cities that returned the survey, so it isn't as widely deployed as other technologies. Of these cities, nine percent of the ramps were metered. We showed you the metropolitan area, so you might be interested in a particular agency. So we can go down to the detail of all the agencies that were surveyed. And, in this case, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation at Allentown, actually reported 14 metered ramps. So, you can get information on individual agencies.
Gordon >> In many cases people are interested in rolled up or summarized information. We have a utility called "Fact Sheets." When you click on that, it takes you to a table of information for nine major components within the metropolitan area. I will scroll down quickly to show a quick view of each of these. For each component, we have a number, 3, 4, or so key indicators of deployment. You can see from this, again the default is the national summary in this case, the default — this shows that we have 31 percent, nationally, of the miles of freeway under electronic surveillance. This is interesting, but a lot of people are interested in a particular metropolitan area.
Gordon >> I will choose Atlanta. For the city of Atlanta, they have 45 percent of their miles under electronic surveillance on the freeways. You can look at individual statistics for other infrastructure components. Another thing you might be interested in is, "How does Atlanta stack up, say, to another city?" I will scroll down carefully to get another button, "Compare Results." This compares metropolitan areas and states, one to the other. Looking at Atlanta, a fast-growing city, to Boston, which is a slower growing city, both large cities. Do we see any significant differences in patterns of deployments for the two cities?
Gordon >> This is another of the fact sheets. I should mention all of the fact sheets can be reproduced in a pdf. They print out in a user-friendly way.
Gordon >> By comparing Atlanta to Boston, you can see that Atlanta has about twice the coverage of electronic surveillance than Boston, and, further, you can see that Atlanta has more than the national average and Boston has below the national average. So, with these fact sheets and doing comparisons you can get a lot of information on particular cities and how they stack up to the relevance of the information.
Gordon >> This is information that — again, two ways of getting at the information. We actually have a third broad area way of getting at the information, through a series of documents. I will now click on the "Download Documents" button. We have a national summary, as the name implies, a nice report of all the results summarized for the nation, for metropolitan and state-wide. We have survey summary reports that report all the facts we received for each of our surveys. And, we have individual city reports. So, every city that we surveyed we have a complete report of all the information received.
Gordon >> This is basically the ways to get at the data. I want to show something else, here, that applies to all the web sites. I'm going to click on the Home button. You may have noticed that on every site we have a key word search box or a word search. We have taken pains to improve this search by making these searches integrated, and I want to demonstrate that capability. If I put in the word "ramp," I will get everything in the Deployment Statistics site related to ramps. I get 24 results. We have information on standards, ramp control, and other things. But, you might wonder if you can get to the costs and benefits information for the same term. You can, by scrolling down. We offer an ability to move to any of the other web sites and search for the same term and get different kinds of information on the same topic.
Gordon >> That is the end of my quick survey of the Deployment Statistics web site. I am going to go back to the "Applications Overview" and hand it over to Joe. Thank you.
Peters >> Thanks, Steve. Continuing on, getting back to our favorite example of incident management — going back to "Motorist Assistance Patrols" — The last major resource that we will talk about is the Lessons Learned Knowledge Resource. By clicking on, "What are the lessons learned?" here, you get a report of all the available lessons pertaining to motorist assistance patrols. I will turn the microphone over to Firoz Kabir, Principal Engineer at Mitretek Systems, and Firoz is the manager of this database, our Lessons Learned Knowledge Resource. Firoz?
Firoz Kabir >> Thank you, Joe. There are six lessons on this particular topic, Motorist Assistance Patrols. Later on, we will deal with the details of one of these lessons. But, let's look at the aspects of the Lessons Learned Knowledge Resource. I'm going to the Lessons Learned home page. Primarily, this web site, this knowledge resource, has been built with a lot of user input. There were about nine user sessions that were conducted to get user input to develop this website. We are up for public display for about nine months, and this is your resource. I am going on to the "Introduction" page just to give a flavor of our objectives and other aspects of our knowledge resource. Primarily, this is a knowledge resource that captures the stakeholders' experiences in planning, development, and operations of ITS. Secondly, we would like to make this knowledge available to all of you in a convenient manner. This is the website that you can always have access for your lessons learned knowledge.
Kabir >> We have developed a classification scheme for classifying the knowledge gathered on different aspects of ITS lessons learned. There are about nine major lesson categories, starting with "Management and Operations," where I am cursoring now, to "Human Resources." There are about 16 application areas. That starts with "Incident Management Systems," "Arterial Management Systems," and similarly, other different topics.
Kabir >> We also have lessons on ITS goal areas. We have some goals in terms of how our ITS deployments are working — for example, increasing safety and efficiency — we have lessons on this particular areas as well. This is a brief overview of the lessons learned categories. I will go back to the homepage once again. Let me explain how I can access lessons that you are particularly interested in. Let's try to get lessons on "Incident Management." If you type in this open search area, then click on search, you will see the lessons on Incident Management." Right now, we have 48 lessons in this particular area.
Kabir >> I will now go down the list further, as you can see we have experience, based on national, different states, Minnesota, Utah, Virginia, and many other places. I will try to show you details of one of the lessons to give you a flavor of what the narrative looks like.
Kabir >> I will show you the detail of a particular lesson right now. This lesson is about real-time data for hurricane transportation evacuation.
Kabir >> This lesson has been basically collected from the experience of several states, and as you can see in the lesson learned narrative, there is background information, then lessons learned information, presented in the form of different action statements.
Kabir >> I am scrolling down further to show you other elements of the narrative. You have the opportunity to provide us with comments, listed as part of the lesson narrative. We always welcome your comments when you read a particular lesson. Further down, we have listed contacts for this particular lesson. There are three different contacts if you want further information about this lesson.
Kabir >> Back to the homepage, I would like to explain further aspects of the knowledge resource. Previously, you typed in "Incident Management" in a search box and you got the lessons in incident management. You can also use another feature — actually select "Incident Management" from the application area, then click on "Find" and you will be able to find the lessons in incident management as well. That is another way to find lessons. Going back to the homepage to show another way of getting data as you like, if you are interested in lessons on incident management and in the state of Alabama, you can click on incident management, and Alabama, then click on "Find." There are two lessons on incident management in Alabama. Going back to the homepage to show you other aspects of this database regarding how we can get lessons in other categories. Here you have nine icons, in the main lesson categories. Here, if you click on "Management and Operations," you will find lessons on that particular subject area. We have about 61 lessons under Management and Operations. Once again, these lessons are written in action statements and presented in a way to know where the lesson was gathered from.
Kabir >> Back to the home page, there are other resources we have for you. On the left navigation bar you can see other elements of the knowledge resource. You can find the Lesson of the Month, which is a lesson that is presented to the ITS Joint Program Office that is a good lesson that we can find from experiences throughout the nation.
Kabir >> There are other ways to find lessons as well. "Lesson Category," "Application Area." You can find lessons on "Goal Area," basically "Productivity," and others. You can find lessons in your own State, whether it is Washington, in the north, or Florida in the south, you can find lessons for all these states. Right now, we have lessons on, primarily U.S. based lessons. In the future, we would like to add lessons from other countries as we gather them. There are other areas, as well, for example, "ITS Initiatives."
Kabir >> And, finally, I would like to draw your attention to the bottom of the left navigation bar, where you can contribute your own lessons. We always welcome to hear from you, and we would like to get lessons to share with other users. At any time, feel free to contact us; here's the contact information. We always welcome your comments to improve this particular resource to serve your needs better. That's more or less the end of my presentation on the Lessons Learned knowledge resource. Going back to "Application Overview" where we started and back to you, Joe.
Peters >> Thank you, Firoz. I would like to get us oriented back to the incident management area, and as I do that, I would like to comment on the fact that the Lesson Learned Knowledge Resource is interactive. In other words, if you happen to read a lesson, and you say, "Gee, this lesson really is not in tune with my experience," you have the opportunity to make that comment, and we will review the comment, post it, and attribute it to you as part of that lesson. We hope that feature will create a forum to discuss a particular lesson.
Peters >> For the remainder of our session, I would like to very quickly show you the remainder of questions and resources. "What evaluation documents are available about this?" — as I click that, it tells you all the documentation we have about "Motorist Assistance Patrols." As I scroll down, you see the project types — in this instance — The "ITS Benefits Special Study, a "Brochure," 'Speeding Response, Saving Lives.' You can click on the Electronic Document Library Number ascribed to this brochure and pull up in real-time the version of that brochure. You can view and inspect it much as you can with all these other reports. Clicking back, going to our next question, "What are the related initiatives or other program activities?" — related to Motorist Assistance Patrols. You see here the fact that the program office currently has nine major initiatives, and they intersect our databases in various ways. You can click on "Integrated Corridor Management Systems," one of our initiatives. They have their own web site and their own web page. So, you can cross over and get information about that particular initiative.
Peters >> Clicking back — "What resources are available?" — is answered by our ITS and Operations Resource Guide. In this particular instance, we have a list of resources related to "Motorist Assistance Patrols" in "Emergency Transportation Operations." If we click that, what you see is the page provided for emergency transportation operations in our ITS Resource Guide. These little icons have points of contact, and web sites. As I scroll down you see the actual documents presented related to Motorist Assistance Patrols. So, we have a series of resources in this guide that are conveniently linked to this "Applications Overview."
Peters >> The last question — "Have we missed anything?" — As you can tell, we are very much interested in feedback. And, if you find there's an area of interest we don't cover, feel free to give us that. We use this feedback to direct our searches to make sure that our databases are as complete as possible, timely, and responsive to your needs. And as I click back to conclude — essentially what you have received today is an overview of the knowledge resources we have, presented through this window called "Applications Overview." You can tab at the top the "Benefits Database," the "Costs Database," the "Deployment Statistics" database, and the "Lessons Learned Knowledge Resource." All of these are independently available, and you can get the one-stop shopping available on this page as demonstrated with the "Motorist Assistance Patrols."
Peters >> In conclusion, I would like to thank you all for participating. I encourage you to go to the live site at www.its.dot.gov, and that will bring us to the homepage also available through the "Applications Overview". Feel free to explore on your own. If there's any questions you have, feel free to go to the help desk indicated in the "Applications Overview." I would like to give you visibility into where we intend to go with this, what our priorities are, and what's new in the way we present these resources. We are continuing, and our highest priority is, to fill gaps in our resources, and your feedback tells us where to direct our attention. We're looking into improved searching and navigation to make the user interface more friendly. We are looking into an e-mail service tailored to what's new in these resources. So, if you are interested in "Motorist Assistance Patrols" you would get an e-mail whenever there's a new posting. We are looking at RSS, Really Simple Syndication, as a method of tagging so you can create your own crawler in an area specific to your interest. We will try to provide more links to sites of interest, and ability to help you contact your own state representatives.
Peters >> We, with that, wish you a pleasant day and thank you for tuning in. I am Joe Peters, I am from the ITS Joint Program Office. I manage the ITS Program Assessment here, and invite you to contact me for more information at Joe.Peters@dot.gov. Thank you and good day.
