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