Worker Presence Subgroup meeting notes, 2020 04 13 - usdot-jpo-ode/wzdx GitHub Wiki
Work Zone Data Working Group
Worker Presence Subgroup meeting #1
April 13, 2020
Attendees
- Arizona DOT – Adam Carreon
- Austin Transportation Department – Luke Urie
- Booz Allen – Eric Ricciardi, Mahsa Ettefagh
- Castle Rock Associates – Kristin Virshbo, Mariah Lynch
- General Motors – David Craig
- HERE – Weimin Huang, Jingwei Xu
- IBI Group – Jacob Brady, Michelle Boucher
- ICF – Polly Okunieff, Rachel Ostroff
- iCone – Ross Sheckler
- Iowa DOT - Dan Sprengeler, Sinclair Stolle
- Kentucky TC – Drew Clark
- Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority – Kali Fogel
- Mapbox – Tom Lee
- Maricopa County DOT – Faisal Saleem
- Maryland DOT – Hua Xiang
- Massachusetts DOT – Neil Boudreau
- Michigan DOT – Chris Brookes
- Minnesota DOT – Rashmi Brewer
- Noblis – Kellen Shain
- Oregon DOT – Chad Mann
- OZ Engineering – Tomas Guerra
- Pennsylvania DOT – Daniel Farley
- Pennsylvania Turnpike – Mike Davidson
- Texas DOT – Jianming Ma
- Tom Tom – Rob Hoyler
- Trillium Solutions - Heidi Guenin
- Uber ATG – Sammy Ghorbanian
- USDOT BTS – Derald Dudley, Kenneth Steve
- USDOT ITS JPO – Ariel Gold
- USDOT OCIO – Amy Nelson
- USDOT Volpe Center – Mark Mockett, Wes Alford
- Utah DOT – Chuck Felice
- Ver-Mac – Serge Beaudry
- Virginia DOT – David Rush
- Washington State DOT – Tom Stidham, Tony Leingang
- Woolpert – Michael Hanowsky
- Wyoming DOT – Charlie Bauer, Wes Bybee
Purpose
- Formalize the Worker Presence Subgroup and introduce Co-Chairs
- Discuss the subgroup charter, activities, and meeting cadence
- Clarify member roles and responsibilities, and outline next steps
Agenda
- Sign-In and Welcome (5 mins)
- Co-Chairs Introduction (5 mins)
- Workers Presence Subgroup Charter Review (15 mins)
- Overview and Discussion of IOO Survey (10 mins)
- Collaboration Environment and Procedure (10 mins)
- Action Items and Next Steps (5 mins)
Notes
Co-chair Introduction
- Serge Beaudry
- Ross Sheckler
- Luke Urie
- Kristin Virsbho is CEO and President of Castle Rock Associates, which provides software to help IOOs know the status of their roadways.
Worker Presence Subgroup Charter Review
- Purpose: the Worker Presence Subgroup will be the lead steward in accelerating the inclusion of worker presence information in WZDx feeds and the use of this data to improve worker safety.
- Promote a shared understanding of what worker presence means in the specification
- Identify means to help DOTs develop information about worker presence
- Why worker presence?
- Improve worker safety: the US loses about 120 workers every year due to crashes in work zone sites.
- Alert drivers as they approach work zones,
- Alert automated driving systems that workers are present and to transition over to a human driver to safely navigate the work zone
- Potential data users have stated that the inclusion of worker presence information is important.
- Scope
- Reviewing current definitions of worker presence (currently WZDx spec has a binary field, is that enough?)
- Summarizing existing means of collecting worker presence information
- Identifying methods of identifying workers on site in work zones (roadside equipment, check in/out, etc.)
- Working with data users to refine the need and use cases of worker presence information
- Working with data producers to understand data privacy, ethical, competitive, or liability issues
- Approach
- Survey the industry to understand current and future plans for definining, capturing, and reporting worker presence, as well as the challenges doing so.
- Interview data consumers to find out how worker presence data would be used and the required level of precision, granularity, reliability, etc.
- Review and synthesize results in a slide deck and report
- (If applicable) Make recommendations to WZDWG v3 Specification Update Subgroup about worker presence data element(s)
- Activity & Milestones: see charter
Survey
- Purpose of producing survey is to collect information from a representative sample of data producers beyond the WZDWG about issues producing worker presence information
- Current plan is to co-sponsor the survey with the American Traffic Safety Services Association (ATSSA) or another association
- Proposed topics:
- Current definitions of worker presence in state and local regulations
- Current methods of collecting worker presence data, and their respective strengths and weaknesses
- Privacy, ethical, and competitive concerns about sharing worker presence information
- Timeline:
- 4 weeks to develop and deploy survey questions
- 8 weeks to collect responses
- 4 weeks to review and synthesize responses
Collaboration
- WZDWG has previously used GitHub to collaboration on specification development by opening issues, writing, and discussing pull requests
- Co-chairs propose using GitHub to collaborate on Worker Presence activities, including drafting survey questions
- Use issues to exchange ideas on each of the survey subjects (one issue per subject)
- When conversation is resolved, convert to Pull Request for voting?
Discussion
- Ariel: Worker presence has been a critical need since the earliest days of the specification, but we’ve also heard loud and clear that roadway operators aren’t able to produce that information yet. Chicken/egg of trying to break the loop
- Kali Fogel: Consider reaching out through ITE to contact local traffic organizations.
- Kali Fogel: Review other FHWA efforts related to worker presence information (https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/wz/its/index.htm) and the fields for identifying people near/in the roadway in the National ITS Architecture (http://local.iteris.com/arc-it/html/infoflows/flow182.html).
- Dave Craig: Are you expecting to make recommendations for v3 of the specification?
- Ariel: probably only for v4 or v5, but anything the co-chairs come up with that’s immediately impactful for v3 could be submitted
Action items
- Email [email protected] to enroll in the Subgroup if you have not already. Going forward, only confirmed members will receive inputs going forward.
- Provide input on additional topics or questions for data producer survey
- Suggest other survey partners and channels