Project 6.3
Citizen Assisted Reporting – Phase 2
The Wyoming Department of Transportation (DOT) has successfully developed and deployed a system that allows authorized citizens to manually report driving conditions to Wyoming DOT staff, who then enter the events into the statewide reporting system for dissemination on 511 and the web. Additional details of Wyoming's Enhanced Citizen Assisted Reporting (ECAR) program were of interest to the North/West Passage members and details of their ECAR were shared in a previous phase of this project (Project 5.1: Citizen Assisting Reporting Phase 1). Phase 2 explored ways in which Wyoming's program could be improved for maximized success in future implementations and explored the feasibility of the expanding citizen reporting additional North/West Passage states.
Through cooperative efforts with the North/West Passage Program, Wyoming DOT is expanding the ECAR project to allow authorized citizens to use a web-based interface to report driving conditions to DOT staff. Also, Idaho Transportation Department (ITD) is developing and implementing a citizen reporting system modeled after the Wyoming system that also will allow authorized citizens to report conditions through a web interface. This approach is different from Wyoming in that Idaho will be allowing direct input from citizens to the reporting systems where in Wyoming citizens call in conditions that are then entered into the reporting system by staff.
With the ultimate goals of consistent reporting across state boundaries, and the potential for long distance travelers to report conditions for both Wyoming and Idaho, the North/West Passage Program helped in this second phase of the project helping the two states (Idaho and Wyoming) work together to develop common reporting phrases and definitions. These phrases were identified by first reviewing the phrases used in the initial Wyoming ECAR program, then by reviewing the common phrases recommended by earlier efforts of the North/West Passage program (Project 3.1: Corridor-Wide Consistent Major Event Descriptions), and finally by reviewing the phrases used by the Idaho Transportation Department. Detailed discussions about the use of the phrases allowed both states to come to agreement on a small list of phrases that is agreed to be manageable to train citizens to use.
The summary report included below provides a table identifying the consistent phrases to be used by the Idaho and Wyoming citizen assisted reporting programs.