Lesson
Integrate various types of road weather information to promote utilization by the public.
An Idaho Transportation Department experience in Road-Weather Information System integration.
2/2/2006
Idaho,United States
Background (Show)
Lesson Learned
There appears to be interest among travelers in receiving detailed road-weather information (i.e., more than a short narrative of road surface conditions) via the Internet. However, to promote utilization of the information, the RWIS deployers should integrate the information such that the website satisfies travelers' "bottom line" travel advisory needs. These lessons are discussed below.
- Provide extensive road-weather information. The ITD experience suggests that travelers are interested in expanded winter road-weather information. The overall utilization of the Road Report website, which includes the traditional (pre-RWIDS) road surface condition information and the new RWIDS webpage, increased dramatically (169%) with the addition of the RWIDS webpage. Road Report users themselves expressed strong support for the on-line road weather information resource. Eighty percent of Road Report survey respondents agreed that the information helped them better prepare for road-weather conditions, and 76 percent of the respondents indicated that the information helped them drive more carefully. Sixty-three percent of respondents indicated that the RWIDS has resulted in the change of time of travel and 48 percent had canceled their trips.
- Integrate discrete road-weather data to satisfy most users. Although many Road Report website users consulted the RWIDS webpage — suggesting an interest in additional information, as noted above — during 80% of sessions, the users penetrated no further than the RWIDS homepage. That is, few users accessed any of the wide range of specific, discrete information available on the RWIDS webpage. For example, camera images, the most popular type of specific information available via the RWIDS page, were accessed in only about 20% of sessions. There was little or no apparent interest in pavement conditions, National Weather Service watches and warnings, weather radar images, National Weather Service forecasts, weather satellite images, or road closure information. This suggests that travelers are unable or unwilling to synthesize a variety of discrete, unconnected road-weather information. Therefore, deployers providing such information should integrate it, such as by developing meaningful "bottom line" travel advisories or grouping data by roadway segment.
States
Countries
Systems Engineering
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None defined
Goal Areas
Keywords
RWIS, ESS, Environmental Sensor Station, RWIS Station, road monitoring, weather station, environmental sensing station
Lesson ID: 2006-00239
Lesson Comments
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