Questions and Answers Addressed During the Webinar
Q: Joe Peters >> Where does the data for ITS in my state come from?
Peters >> Good question. Those data come from a survey that Oak Ridge Laboratory conducts. Steve Gordon will discuss that more.
Steve Gordon [From a portion of his demonstration] >> This information that I am showing you now is from a 2004 survey. We surveyed 78 major metropolitan areas and 30 medium sized metropolitan areas for a total of 108. We also surveyed, in a separate survey format, each of the 50 states to get states wide deployment. In total, we surveyed about 2300 agencies in 2004. Last year in 2005, we did a limited survey of just the largest metropolitan areas, and those results will be posted later this month. We are in the process of planning a 2006 survey.
Q: [Not read in audio] >> Will you cover specific ITS performance measures?
A: Peters >> As far as specific ITS performance measures, we will not go into specific performance measures at the state DOT level of how states would create performance measures, but clearly we will be talking about the benefits.
Q: Peters >> There's a mention about IDAS being on the main page and why not DYNAS, SmartP and Scritts?
A: Peters >> That is a good question, and we will talk about that later. I'm not sure I have the answer to that. It's a good question we can follow up with, though.
Q: Peters >> Does the U.S. DOT have plans to develop warrants for specific ITS applications, such as warrants for DMS?
A: Peters >> The answer is I don't know, but I can find out. My guess is I don't think so, but there is a deployment tracking — I mean a deployment support team that is led by a guy here at the headquarters, Steve Clinger. And I will refer that question to him.
Q: Peters >> Who were the surveys sent to, and how did you come up with the contact list?
A: Gordon >> We surveyed agencies within the metropolitan area planning boundaries within each of the cities that I talked about. We identified within each of those metropolitan urbanized areas of 50,000 or greater. For every one of those. We contacted the police, fire, the traffic control — if they controlled traffic signals — and/or freeways if they had control of freeways. We did a lot of basic work on finding the people and getting the information in that way. We also asked the MPOs, initially, for help on contacts within metropolitan planning areas. If you look at the reports for each particular city, you can get a list of all the agencies we talked to. On the statewide, we just called each of the states and said who would be the point of contact for weather, maintenance, operations, things like that. So, as I said, we have a body of about 2300 agencies that we have had contacts with.
Peters >> If there are folks out there who are saying, I am from a certain state, and of this doesn't look right to me, please let us know. If you think we have missed something, the best way for us to improve what we have is to know what problems are suspect. Then we can — that way verify that.
Q: Peters >> Can the yearly inflation be updated on your site?
A: Gordon >> The answer is, we have been doing an every other year update, because the survey is quite involved and it is difficult for respondents. We would overload them if we went to every year. In fact, what we are looking at is having less detail all our surveys but increase the frequency, so we can have a yearly update. That is a goal. But we have to be careful we don't overload our respondents with requirements.
Q: Craig Austin >> This question came up last week in Los Angeles from the office there. What are the unit costs for bus AVL Systems for bus and central equipment?
A: Peters >> I would go immediately to the Cost database. And, AVL, I would think that is Transit Management is a big area of AVL. The other thing I could do is do the search engine if I dared do that. But, let me just click on Transit Management, and I want to go into - you know what I will do, is turn this over to Barbara Staples, who is the expert on the Cost database.
A: Barbara Staples >> Thank you, Joe. You were started on the right path. What I would do is go down and look under Fleet Management AVL. I noticed at one point we had some data from L.A. Let's see. We would look under here, and there is some data from Ann Arbor and from Denver that we could click on. This is in the system's cost database. That is a lot of information. And here is some per bus information. One thing I wanted to point out is the system cost summaries are all unique to the source information. So, we may have per bus costs for AVL for this system cost summary and have it aggregated for a different level for another one. Users may need to spend just a little bit of time in the database looking for the data, but you can see here that there was a cost of the $ 35,000 per bus, including more than just the AVL. It has got other data, terminals, other software, other components such one would need to implement and deploy an ADL System. I believe this particular summary also includes some of the central equipment or some of the back-office processing. I don't know if you can see radio system hardware components. So this is one example of a per bus cost. You can spend a little bit of time to find out what all is included in it. You can see they have divided this over a fleet of 75 buses. A user could come in here and back out some of the costs of these components that may or may not be applicable to their deployment. So, I hope that answers the question. I would be happy to spend it little bit more time on that or I can turn it back over to you, Joe.
Peters >> The unit costs database for AVL?
Staples >> Yes.
Peters >> Also, answer the unit cost question?
Staples >> Let me scroll up ... I'm in the Unadjusted Costs, and there are two subsystems that I would look at. The first one would be Transit Vehicle on Board. Remember, when you are in the Unit Costs subsystem, you need to think about where the equipment physically resides. So, the caller was interested in unit costs on the bus as well as the central equipment. So here, in Transit Vehicle on Board, we can look down to see different costs for digital GPS per vehicle. You could get a range from low to high and also some operating maintenance costs. I'm going to click the Back button and take you to the Transit Management Center. That is where you could look to find unit costs for some of the central equipment or back-office processing for that. I will scroll up. You can see some of the hardware costs, here. This is all for some of the central equipment back at the central processing center. This is some of the cost of software and integrating, even some of the labor estimates.
Peters >> And if somebody says that this 1995 data under Transit Center Labor, what if I wanted to get an adjusted rate on that?
Staples >> That is a good question. Then I would go to adjusted costs, and I am going to go to the same — again, it's the same format — I'm going to go over here to Transit Management Center, and just stay right here, Transit Center Hardware. And what we have done is adjusted the costs to 2004 dollars. You will see the index and there is a five, right here. And, what you would need to do is go back to the indexes. And we are providing this information, because we want users to know where we get these indexes, how we have adjusted the costs, in case they don't want to use that index, they want to use something else. And the user can see what we have done and go out and looking at other data or other indexes that they would like to use. The index five is WPU115. That is for computer hardware. I'm going to take a few more minutes if that is okay. What will be presented is the actual series from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Here we go. Item five. What we have done is we have populated this web page with the indexes from the Bureau Labor Statistics. And it tells you that it is not seasonally adjusted, what group it came from, the base, date, and it gives you all the info. So, if you want to use this number you can. If not you can go and look for other information to use to escalate that information. I think — I just realized that you mentioned labor and had looked to see which one of the indexes we used for labor. If I can, I would like to point out a really nice tool. You can download the Excel version of the Unit Costs database. We have set that up so that we go in on one page and set up all of the different indexes. If you, the user, want to download that and change the indexes, it can prepopulate the fields for you by just making a few minor changes in the indexes to the Excel version. I hope that helps.
