Skip to main content

PennDOT honoured for modernised data collection

PennDOT's modernised field data collection process recently received an international achievement award for its innovative use of geographic information system technology. The Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award recognises vision, leadership, hard work and innovative use of technology and was presented at the Esri International User Conference in San Diego. PennDOT received the award for its use of technology to collect information on local roads and bridges such as location, condition and structure type
July 17, 2013 Read time: 2 mins
6111 Pennsylvania Department of Transportation's (PennDOT) modernised field data collection process recently received an international achievement award for its innovative use of geographic information system technology.

The Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award recognises vision, leadership, hard work and innovative use of technology and was presented at the Esri International User Conference in San Diego.

PennDOT received the award for its use of technology to collect information on local roads and bridges such as location, condition and structure type. The mobile collection method allows better documentation of local roads and bridges in the department's asset inventory systems and allowed PennDOT to reduce the time to collect information on a single local bridge structure from twenty to six minutes. The software also supported collecting information on more than 30,000 segments of local roads and nearly 3,700 local bridges, replacing paper forms and manual data entry.

“We're very proud to receive this award recognising our efforts to modernise how we do business," PennDOT secretary Barry J Schoch said. "By using innovative, mobile technology we can collect data on state and locally owned roads quickly and more efficiently so that we have current information on road and bridge conditions.”

Related Content

  • February 1, 2012
    Need for harmonisation in ITS standards
    As the calendar rolls over, and we hop from continent to continent and World Congress to World Congress, where Memoranda of Understanding and cooperation agreements are the headline news, it is easy for those not intimately involved to forget that standards definition is a well-nigh continual process. Significant progress has been made in recent months towards achieving the critical mass and economies of scale which are going to drive development and deployment in, amongst other things, cooperative infrastr
  • January 30, 2012
    Investigating charging methods for open road tolling
    Toll system suppliers are considering service structures and technologies needed to address issues of social exclusion in open road tolling. Jason Barnes asked Telvent's Pat McGowan to explain moves to address the needs of all toll customers
  • December 5, 2012
    Reducing congestion with Tomtom's historical traffic data
    Historical traffic data provided by TomTom is being used by the local government in Spain’s Basque region to reduce road congestion at less cost. Old habits die hard. Photos from as far back as the 1930s show people counting cars by the roadside in order to provide congestion data to those running road networks. Today, such techniques are still used, albeit augmented by a range of automation technologies such as inductive loops, infra-red sensors and number plate recognition. Even with these advances, howe
  • July 17, 2012
    Cloud computing technology benefits GIS
    Geographic Information Systems are a relatively late adopter of cloud computing,but the benefits of host services for geospatial data and analysis are becoming clear. Jason Barnes reports Both the concept and the reality of cloud computing have been around for some time. More and more industry sectors are entrusting external service providers with the provision of their computing services via the internet. However, the Geographic Information System (GIS) industry has been slow to embrace the trend. This is