Cartegraph and Esri: Cobb County’s powerful approach to snow events

Challenge

Cobb County DOT’s readiness efforts for winter weather include five staging areas for salt and pre-defined treatment routes, as well as equipment for de-icing and snow removal. However, knowing the challenges associated with a major snow event, Cobb also required a traffic management solution that would help it efficiently plan road maintenance and allocate resources during inclement weather. The organization’s need proved threefold:

1. A better system for documenting the progress of spreader trucks and plows, and helping county leadership predict when specific roads would be cleared.
2. A tool for accurately planning road maintenance routes so the busiest and most crucial roads receive priority plowing and salting.
3. A process for informing citizens when to expect local streets to be plowed, salted, and restored to a safe travel condition.

Solution

The powerful combination of Cartegraph and the ArcGIS platform answered Cobb County’s need. During the snow events of 2014, the County used the systems in perfect tandem. By combining Cartegraph’s road asset management system software with the road segments feature class in the Esri ArcGIS platform and traffic counts event layer, the DOT created an effective and efficient response that:

1. Ensured arterial and major routes were prioritized and cleared first
2. Prioritized services on minor roads through segment slope and traffic volume analysis
3. Communicated live, up-to-the-minute information to citizens

The Cobb County DOT GIS team has also created a proof-of-concept ArcGIS Dashboard that pulls AVL tracking information in through ArcGIS GeoEvent Server, updating the status of routes that were cleared as tasks are opened and closed in Cartegraph. The map shows the status of the snow route, with the color-changing based on when the surface was last treated.

The winter weather dashboard also includes gadgets with surface temperatures from Georgia DOT, links to live camera feeds of road conditions, and real-time weather reports from Waze.