Tag Archives: Minnesota

Traffic and Safety

MnDOT Tests Crowdsourcing to Improve Road Condition Reporting

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The Minnesota Department of Transportation is testing a crowdsourcing application that will allow motorists to update winter weather road conditions on the state’s 511 system.

The Regional Transportation Management Center is planning a soft launch of Citizen Reporting in April, initially inviting MnDOT employees to post their experiences on routes they travel.  By next winter, the RTMC hopes to invite the public to do the same.

“We suspect that citizen reporters will be similar in ethic to the kinds of people who volunteer to be weather spotters,” said MnDOT Transportation Program Specialist Mary Meinert, who assists with day-to-day operations of 511.

511 Citizen Reporting
Iowa launched Citizen Reporting in November. Here is an example of a citizen report.

Currently,  MnDOT maintenance crews report road conditions, but Greater Minnesota lacks 24/7 coverage and its reports can become quickly outdated, especially on highways that aren’t plowed as frequently or lack traffic cameras, said 511 System Coordinator Kelly Kennedy Braunig.

Citizen reporting, especially on weekends, will help keep that information fresh.

“We try to explain on the website that we only update from 3–6 a.m., 3–6 p.m. Monday through Friday and as road conditions change, but we still get many emails requesting more frequent road condition information,” Braunig said.

Even a recent comment on MnDOT’s Facebook page pointed out the limitations in one area of the state: “Updates [only] come during government work hours.”

Growing Service

It’s actually a welcome sign that the public wants more from 511.

Seven years ago, when Braunig applied for her job, not many people used 511. In fact, at the time, she wasn’t even aware of the service, which provides information to travelers on weather-related road conditions, construction and congestion.

Today, 511’s online program and mobile app are accessed by more than 5,000 people per day during the winter (and about half as many during the summer). Data comes from MnDOT’s construction and maintenance offices, as well as state trooper data and incident response. This real-time information is available for all of Minnesota.

In the Twin Cities metro area, more than 700 traffic cameras allow MnDOT and State Patrol dispatchers to check the condition of 170 miles of highways and monitor traffic incidents at any time. Rochester, Duluth, Mankato and Owatonna also have cameras for incident management and traffic monitoring.

The 511 system’s greatest challenge is in Greater Minnesota, where road condition information is used daily by schools, ambulance personnel and truckers, as well as the traveling public, but information isn’t updated frequently outside of business hours.  Citizen reporting will be a beneficial resource.

Other states

Other northern states face similar challenges as Minnesota, but have been able to improve the timeliness of road condition data with assistance from truckers and other motorists.

In Wyoming, more than 400 citizen reporters (primarily truckers) call in road conditions to the Transportation Management Center. In Idaho, citizen reporters directly put the information into the 511 system. Minnesota will be the fifth state to adopt citizen reporting, following Iowa, which launched its service in November 2014.

Like Iowa, Minnesota’s citizen reporting will initially focus on winter roads.

To participate, people will need to take an online training module and then register their common routes, perhaps the highways they take to work or their way to the cabin on the weekends. These contributions will be marked as a citizen report on the website.

“Minnesota truck drivers are loyal users of the 511 system and we suspect they will also make some of our best reporters,” Meinert said.

Minnesota is part of a 13-state consortium that shares a 511 service technology provider. States with citizen reporting recently shared their experiences in a Peer Exchange sponsored by North/West Passage, a transportation pooled fund that is developing ways to share 511 data across state lines.

“With citizen reporting we hope to give people a voice and a chance to participate,” Braunig said.

Maintenance Operations

MnDOT Plow Drivers Invent New, Hybrid Plow Design

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If the plow pictured above looks like two different plows welded together, it’s because they are.

Minnesota Department of Transportation snow plow operators in southwestern Minnesota have invented an experimental plow that uses the wind to cast snow from the road without impeding traffic or the operator’s view.

Manufactured for MnDOT by Fall Plows, the plow incorporates half of a traditional bull-dozer style plow with half of a Batwing-style plow.  It eliminates the large “ear” on the driver’s side of a Batwing style plow that can stick out into oncoming traffic during center-line snow removal.

Half of the reversible batwing-style plow, pictured at left, was combined with half of the reversible bulldozer-style plow, pictured at right.
Half of the reversible batwing-style plow, pictured at left, was combined with half of the reversible bulldozer-style plow, at right.

District 8 Willmar Maintenance Supervisor Dennis Marty said he was looking for a reversible-style plow that could be used in the heavy winds and reduced visibility from blowing snow that are prevalent in western Minnesota.

When drivers are plowing against a northwest wind in rural Minnesota, the snow coming out of the chute will sweep across the truck and blind drivers, so operators needed a plow with a reversible system so they could throw the snow with the wind.

While an express plow with chutes on both ends (batwing-style), pictured above at left, was great for throwing snow to the right, when snow plow drivers took it down narrow two-lane roads, the plow stuck 2.5 feet into the oncoming lane and its big barrel partially blocked the headlights and the operator’s view.

So operators tried a regular one-way plow (pictured below), which resembles a funnel laid on it side, and put it on a reversible system that would allow operators to turn the plow both directions, so it could throw snow to the right or the left. However, this plow couldn’t blow snow high enough to the left, so snow piled in the left traffic lane.

One-way reversible plow.
One-way reversible plow.

Marty said he spent four to five years looking for a plow that combined the batwing and bull-dozer designs, but he couldn’t find anything sturdy and maintenance-free enough. Finally, he and Maintenance Research Program Administrator Ryan Otte sat down with Falls Plows in Little Falls, Minnesota and asked the company to build one.

The plow will be useful on low-volume roads that have little traffic during the middle of the night, which allows plow operators to cast the snow with the wind.

The Willmar office began using the experimental plow last winter and will be replacing all of its plows with it. Snow plow drivers from other areas of the state have been so impressed that at least two other maintenance districts have also ordered them.

Related Research

MnDOT’s Office of Maintenance has its own research program designed to let maintenance personnel test innovative ideas to keep our roads smooth, snow-free and safe. They even put out a monthly bulletin featuring new ideas and technologies. (You can find the back issues here.)

Other winter maintenance research projects are featured in MnDOT’s 2011-2013 Maintenance Operations Research Report  (PDF, 9 MB, 98 pages)

Materials and Construction

MnDOT, Alabama center team up for national pavement research

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The nation’s two largest pavement test tracks are planning their first-ever co-experiments.

The Minnesota Department of Transportation’s Road Research Facility (MnROAD) and the National Center for Asphalt Technology (NCAT) began discussing a formal partnership last year and have now asked states to join a pair of three-year research projects that will begin this summer.

Representatives of the test tracks are meeting next week in Minneapolis at the 19th Annual TERRA Pavement Conference. They said the partnership will develop a national hot mix asphalt cracking performance test and expand the scope of existing pavement preservation research at the NCAT facility in Auburn, Alabama, to  include northern test sections in Minnesota.

MnROAD plans to build test sections at its facility and also off-site on a low- and high-volume road, which may include concrete test sections if funding allows. These Minnesota test sections will supplement 25 test sections built by NCAT on an existing low-volume haul route in 2010 and an off-site high-volume test road planned for this summer in Alabama to assess the life-extending benefits of different pavement preservation methods. Both agencies have also been developing performance tests to predict the cracking potential of asphalt mixes, and they will now work together on that research as well.

“We will collect and analyze the data in similar ways, and I think we’ll have a greater appeal nationally, as we cover a range of climate conditions,” said MnROAD Operations Engineer Ben Worel.

Participation in the pavement preservation study is $120,000 per year for the initial research cycle, which will drop to $40,000 after three years; the cracking study will run three years at $210,000 per year.  Alabama will be the lead state for this effort.

State departments of transportation are asked for commitment letters this month if they are interested in joining either study, even if they do not have SP&R (State Planning and Research) dollars available at the time. Participating agencies will get to design the scope of the research and be kept advised of the ongoing findings, so they can benefit early from the project. Initial planning meetings will be done through a series of webinars in March and April of this year with participating agencies.

At a January 8 webinar, speakers said the research will help states determine how long pavement preservation treatments will last.

“Many DOTs have really well-designed and well-thought-out decision trees, where they can take pavement management data and end up with a rational selection of pavement alternatives. But the issue of extending pavement life is the really big unknown, because references provide a broad range of expected performance,”  NCAT Test Track Manager Buzz Powell said.

Another benefit is that states can learn how pavement treatments hold up in both hot and cold climates.

“It’s 14 degrees right now in Mississippi. It rains about every three days, freezes and then thaws,” said Mississippi Chief Engineer Mark McConnell. “So we need to know how pavement preservation is going to work in the north as well.”

For additional information, contact Ben Worel (ben.worel@state.mn.us) at MnROAD or Buzz Powell (buzz@auburn.edu) at NCAT.

mnroad_ncat
Aerial views of the pavement test tracks at MnROAD (left) and NCAT (right).
Policy and Planning

Study reveals how Minnesota industries rely on transportation

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Results of a newly released MnDOT research report shed new light on the role transportation plays in our state’s economic competitiveness, and highlight the unique challenges faced by some of the state’s major industry clusters.

The report, authored by Professor Lee Munnich of the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, underscores the importance of a reliable transportation system in facilitating economic growth. Munnich examined the impact of transportation on Minnesota’s competitive industry clusters — geographically concentrated, interconnected groups of companies and institutions that share knowledge networks, supply chains and specialized labor pools.

MnDOT Research Project Engineer Bruce Holdhusen said MnDOT’s goal with the study was to discover how its investment decisions could help support job creation and economic prosperity.

“The idea is to look at the companies and industries that are already bringing money into the state, figure out what their transportation challenges are, and then use that information to see what kind of investments we could make to support their continued growth,” Holdhusen said.

MnDOT is incorporating the results of the study into its statewide freight planning. The industry clusters-approach also is being used by MnDOT in a statewide effort to talk with manufacturers, other shippers, and carriers about their transportation priorities and challenges.  MnDOT will focus on its Metro District starting this summer.  Two similar projects have been undertaken in Greater Minnesota, with a third study starting later this year. (Results from one study, in southwest Minnesota/District 8, are available online.)

The full report is available online, and examines a wide range of industries, including forest products, medical devices, robotics and processed foods. We’ve pulled out a few interesting tidbits below.

Recreational Vehicles (Northwest Minnesota)

A semi truck driving on a snowy highway.
Minnesota winters are great for snowmobiling, but not always great for shipping snowmobiles. (Photo by Dave Gonzalez, MnDOT)

As noted in the report, Minnesota’s extreme winter weather poses unique challenges to its economic competitiveness. Ironically, nowhere is this more evident than in the state’s snowmobile-producing northwest corner.

Polaris and Arctic Cat (together with smaller, more specialized firms like Mattracks) employ thousands of Minnesotans, producing a wide variety of recreational vehicles and accessories that are sold and distributed all over the world. While the companies’ snowmobiles might fare well in a blizzard, the trucks that deliver them don’t. A bad snowstorm can cause delays in both supply and product shipments; it can also prevent employees from getting to work, or even shut down a plant altogether. On a larger scale, these issues make it difficult for the companies to expand at their ideal rates.

The report notes that MnDOT’s 511 system is an important source for many companies to identify and respond to potential shipping delays. It recommends continuous improvements to the system.

The Mayo Clinic (Rochester Area)

Metal FedEx containers at an airport.
Air carriers like FedEx have limited capacity for refrigerated shipments, which creates challenges for shipping medical lab samples. (Photo by Dave Gonzalez, MnDOT)

The Mayo Clinic has become synonymous with the Rochester metropolitan area, and for good reason: it employs 37,000 residents and brings in 500,000 unique patients each year from all 50 U.S. states and 150 countries. As you might imagine, generating that much activity in a community of only 110,000 people creates some unique and significant transportation challenges.

Unlike most competitor institutions (Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, for example), the Mayo clinic is located in a relatively small metropolitan area. The local airport has an older navigation system and offers less direct commercial air service. As a result, it depends on high-quality transit and freight service to help accommodate the constant flow of visitors and supplies. The shipping of highly perishable lab samples is also a challenge, as air carriers have limited capacity for refrigeration. Finally, adverse weather conditions can affect emergency services dispatchers’ ability to send fast modes of transportation such as helicopters.

Hospitality and Tourism (Brainerd Lakes Area)

Boats docked on a lake at dawn.
Lakeside resorts a great way to enjoy Minnesota’s scenic beauty — but getting there can be a challenge. (Photo by Dave Gonzalez, MnDOT)

The oil boom in North Dakota has generated a lot of wealth in a short amount of time, and resorts like the Grand View Lodge in Nisswa would love to capture some of it by enticing new vacationers from the west. The trouble is, the area is inconvenient to reach from that direction.

A four-lane highway makes it easy for visitors from St. Cloud or the Twin Cities to visit resorts in the Brainerd area, but travelers coming from the Dakotas face a more circuitous route. Air travel options help to an extent, as visitors from even farther distances can fly into Fargo and then drive in from there. St. Cloud also has daily air service from Chicago, which helps maintain a constant flow of visitors.

Related Materials

Traffic and Safety

Six Ways to do Multimodal in Greater Minnesota

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Can rural Minnesota do multimodal?

You betcha, says a new study by University of Minnesota researcher Carol Becker, who compiled 65 examples of innovative multimodal rural and small urban transportation projects from around the United States.

The study, funded by the Minnesota Department of Transportation, looks at alternatives for promoting and strengthening multimodal transportation in rural and small urban areas. Becker developed these six case studies to showcase different modes and strategies:

Retrofitting Sidewalks

The city of Olympia, Washington, was mostly built during the automobile era. As a result, most of the city developed without sidewalks. In 2004, Olympia passed a voter referendum that linked enhanced parks with adding sidewalks throughout the city. The referendum was supported by parents who wanted safe routes to school for their children and by environmentalists who wanted alternatives to driving. But the key to voter approval was linking recreation at parks with recreation walking to and from the parks. The Parks and Pathways program is now retrofitting miles of sidewalks into neighborhoods.

A sidewalk that was built using utility tax funds on San Francisco Avenue in Olympia, Washington.
A sidewalk that was built using utility tax funds on San Francisco Avenue in Olympia, Washington.
Intercity Bus Service

North Dakota has the third-lowest population density in the United States. Despite this, it has a network of buses that connect small towns to larger regional centers. Such alternatives to driving allow residents — particularly elderly and disabled persons — to stay in their communities rather than move to large cities to access needed services.
InterCity

Senior Transportation

A nonprofit in Mesa, Arizona, implemented a program to reimburse eligible seniors for car trips provided by other individuals. The program was moved to the regional transit provider for expansion. It did not scale up well, however, and was recently replaced with the East Valley RideChoice Program, which provides seniors and disabled adults with  discounted cards for taxi service. RideChoice participants can receive up to $100 of taxi service per month for either $25 or $30, depending on their city of residence.

Photo courtesy of Valley Metro RideChoice
Photo courtesy of RideChoice
Integrating Highways into Small Town Fabric

One challenge to making smaller communities more walkable and pedestrian-friendly is that most small towns are built around MainStreethighways. In fact, unless a bypass has been built, the main street of a small town is also typically a highway. This creates a conflict between groups who want to move vehicles efficiently and groups who want pedestrian-friendly downtowns.

Oregon took two steps to help mediate this:

  • Added a functional classification to the Oregon Highway Manual for the portion of roadway that runs through small towns. This functional classification has very different design standards that can accommodate walking, biking, commercial activity along the roadway, parking along the roadway and many other small-town needs.
  • “Main Street: When A Highway Runs Through It” was written to help local governments understand their options for creating a multimodal environment and better advocate for their interests with the Oregon Department of Transportation. The document explains ODOT funding processes and  shows examples of design options. Local governments can then adopt these elements and standards into their local plans, which ODOT must work with when doing highway improvements.
Complete Streets

Clinton, Iowa, is a city with a population of 27,000 on the Mississippi River in eastern Iowa. In 1995, the rail yard closed, which provided an opportunity to redevelop land. The city created a comprehensive long-range plan that included remediating soil contamination, purchasing land for redevelopment, realigning two streets and increasing transportation choices with a “complete streets” design. The reclaimed land will support a multi-use path, sidewalks and connections to cross streets.

Approximately $50 million has been secured for the project.  A $2.7 million Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant was also received from the U.S. Department of Transportation in 2012 to pay for a multi-use trail with a direct connection to the Mississippi River Trail, decorative lighting and plantings. In the future, land will be sold for higher density, walkable development.

A look at part of Clinton, Iowa’s redeveloped old railroad area, now called Liberty Square.
Impact Fees for Funding Infrastructure

As resistance increases to broad-based taxes, there has been a shift toward funding transportation with fees linked to specific projects. Examples include:

  • Concurrency laws, which require capacity in governmental systems (either planned or existing) before development can occur. If capacity does not exist, development cannot occur. In the state of Washington, a number of cities use concurrency to set transportation fees paid by new development. Bellingham, Washington, uses this kind of system to raise funds for transportation projects.
  • Development impact fees. Contra Costa County, California, has a capital plan for transportation improvements and sets a fee that is paid by new development to fund that infrastructure. Fees vary from under $1,000 to over $15,000 depending on where new development is occurring. The county expects to raise more than $845 million in transportation dollars from 2014 to 2030 using such a mechanism.
  • Allowing local units of government to create special districts to fund transportation projects.
Related Resources

Rural and Small Urban Multi-Modal Alternatives for Minnesota – Final Report

Traffic and Safety

How those little blue lights make intersections safer

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A story from WCCO-TV last week answered a question that has likely been puzzling many commuters passing through Ramsey County: what are those blue lights popping up on traffic signals?

The report explains that the blue lights illuminate when a traffic signal changes to red, allowing a patrol officer to witness and enforce a signal violation more easily and safely. What the report doesn’t explain is the safety benefits to be gained from increased red light enforcement.

In Ramsey County, the proposal for a recent large deployment of blue lights came from traffic engineers, not police.

“Our county safety highway program conducted by MnDOT indicated a lot of right-angle crashes related to people running red lights,” said Ramsey County Planner Joseph Lux. “These are typically the accidents with the severest injuries.”

As part of the statewide Towards Zero Deaths (TZD) initiative in July 2013, MnDOT worked with counties to develop safety plans that emphasize low-cost, high-value safety improvements.

A federal grant is helping fund the installation of 128 blue lights at 49 intersections in Ramsey County (see locations) over the next two weeks. Deputies will begin enforcement later this month, but the hope is that the blue lights will be so effective,  active enforcement won’t be necessary long-term.

A blue light, positioned on each of the four corner intersection poles, turn on whenever the opposite signal light turns red.

“The comments we’ve received from local police is they don’t want to write tickets; they just want people to quit running red lights,” Lux said.

IMG_2431
Blue light indicators were affixed to existing signal poles at Lexington Avenue and Larpenteur Avenue in Roseville.

The blue light indicators allow a police officer to view an infraction from many viewpoints, instead of having to pursue the offending vehicle through the intersection. Also only one squad is required to patrol an intersection; not two.

The blue light indicators have been shown to increase traffic safety. In Florida, crashes due to people running red lights fell by 33 percent, according to a low-cost safety improvement pooled fund study conducted on behalf of MnDOT and 37 other states.

Unlike Florida’s blue lights, Ramsey County’s are being placed on the signal pole, instead of the masthead. They’re more prominent than a couple indicators the county tried previously at accident-prone intersections in Little Canada and Maplewood.

“They’re bright and noticeable to the public, but not distracting, like the ones Florida puts on the masthead,” Lux explained.

According to WCCO-TV, the blue lights are funded by a $120,000 federal grant, with $13,000 in matching local funds.

Temporary signs will be put up by Ramsey County to notify the public of the new indicators.

A few other Minnesota communities — including Blaine, Crystal, Olmsted County and Dakota County — have also installed blue light indicators in recent years.

Lux explained that Ramsey County is installing blue lights on intersections that are easily enforced by law enforcement, as well as those that aren’t, in hopes that the public will obey them all because of the heightened presence.

Maintenance Operations

Mobile imagery, LiDAR help MnDOT maintain its assets

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How do you quickly and cost-effectively get an accurate inventory of transportation assets spread out along more than 1,100 miles of roadway?

That was the problem facing the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s Metro District, which needed an inventory of its plate beam guardrail and concrete barriers.

To accomplish this, engineers in the district launched an innovative research implementation project using a pair of mobile mapping technologies — Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and mobile imaging — that can collect vast amounts of geospatial data on highway infrastructure in a safe and efficient manner.

Mobile imaging uses a camera mounted on a vehicle driving at highway speeds to take high-resolution photos at regular intervals. It’s accurate to within 1 foot, which makes it suitable for use in preliminary (30 percent) design plans without additional field surveys. In this project, researchers collected mobile images of roadway barriers and extracted data from them along Metro District roadways, including all ramps, overpasses, interchanges, weigh stations, rest areas and historical sites.

A MnDOT worker replaces a section of broken guardrail.
A MnDOT worker replaces a section of broken guardrail on I-94 near the Lowry Tunnel in Minneapolis. (Photo by Dave Gonzalez, MnDOT)

Researchers also collected LiDAR data at three Metro District sites. LiDAR uses a laser range finder and reflected laser light to measure distances. It provides survey-grade data accurate to within 0.1 foot, but it is significantly more expensive to collect than mobile imaging.

“Mobile imagery and mobile LiDAR are relatively new technologies, but this research shows that they are options that we can use. Collecting this information manually would have taken a lot more time and money,” said MnDOT Asset Management Engineer Trisha Stefanski.

MnDOT’s barrier inventory will provide invaluable information for design, planning and maintenance. The data will be published on MnDOT’s Georilla map server, where it will be beneficial to a variety of projects and recurring tasks. For example, if a vehicle hits a barrier, maintenance staff will be able to check the database to see the type of barrier and end treatment to ensure they bring the right equipment to make repairs. Although the project focused on barriers, the imagery contains data on other assets as well. MnDOT has already used the imagery to extract noise wall and sign data.

This blog post was adapted from an article in our upcoming issue of Accelerator, MnDOT’s research and innovation newsletter.

3D-vertical
Thousands of data points can be extracted from this image of a Highway 61 roadway segment created with LiDAR Technology.
Bridges and Structures

‘High Bridge’ study yields insights on bridge deck maintenance

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One of St. Paul’s most iconic landmarks is helping the Minnesota Department of Transportation find the most cost-effective methods of maintaining concrete bridge decks.

For the last three years, the Smith Avenue High Bridge, which connects downtown St. Paul with the city’s west side, has served as a test bed for a variety of products used to seal cracks on bridge decks. Through MnDOT-funded research, various sealant products have been applied on different areas of the bridge deck, with their performance tracked over time.

“This project will help MnDOT make cost-effective maintenance decisions to preserve its current bridge infrastructure,” said Sarah Sondag, a senior engineer with MnDOT Bridge Operations Support.

The bridge was chosen in part because of its large deck area, which allowed for the application of 12 sealant products and three control sections.

Sealing deck cracks is a routine preventive maintenance task for bridge crews. Left untreated, cracks can allow moisture and chlorides to penetrate the bridge deck, which can lead to the corrosion of reinforcing steel, deck deterioration and the need for early deck replacement.

researcher testing permeability of a deck crack on the Smith Avenue Bridge
A researcher tests the permeability of a crack on the deck of the Smith Avenue High Bridge in St. Paul.

MnDOT maintains a list of approved bridge deck crack sealing products, but until now had little data on how well each one performs in the field. The recently published report also examined several products that are not currently on the Approved Products List.

Among the study’s findings: some of the products on MnDOT’s Approved Products List did not perform as well as other products that are not currently on the list. MnDOT is using the results of the study to update its qualification process for products to get on the approved list. Insights gained from studying application techniques will also be used to update MnDOT’s bridge maintenance manual.

*Note: This blog post was adapted from an article and technical summary that will be featured in the upcoming issue of the Accelerator newsletter.

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