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OFFICE OF OPERATIONS   21st CENTURY OPERATIONS USING 21st CENTURY TECHNOLOGIES

Road Weather Management Crowdsourcing Examples

The following table lists organizations’ use of crowdsourced data (by source) to support aspects of road weather management. Please share your organization’s road weather crowdsourcing example with any of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Everyday Counts Round Six (EDC-6) Crowdsourcing for Advancing Operations Innovation coleads listed under Contact Us.

What
(Application)
Who
(Organization)
Data
Source
Brief Description

Citizen Reporter Program

Utah Department of Transportation (DOT)

In-house mobile app

The Utah DOT Citizen Reporter Program provides a consistent way for volunteers to report weather and road conditions (including incidents) to the agency. Unique to this program is the training that citizen reporters receive and an automated tool to balance citizen reports with meteorological data. This program created over 1,800 reports during the 2013–2014 winter season, and a sampling of the crowdsourced data was over 99 percent accurate.

Rapid Weather and Road Condition Detection

Kentucky Transportation Cabinet

Waze
HERE®

The agency combines crowdsourced data with TMC data and external datasets to better manage and report the treatment of roadways under snow and ice conditions. The use of Waze data in March 2015 enabled the agency to quickly dispatch trucks to a sudden storm area that would have otherwise taken significantly longer to detect and respond.

Road Condition Updates in Extreme Weather Conditions

South Carolina DOT

Waze

During Hurricane Florence, the agency used Waze data to update weather-related road conditions. These data were bolstered by 350 volunteer map editors who were dedicated solely to hurricane‑related road updates. The agency used this data to identify flooded roads and to update public road condition information far more quickly than in the past.

Last Modified: 11/09/2023