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Web-based Road Monitoring
James Evans writes "The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) are testing a Web-based system for weather forecasting and winter road treatment that could soon save lives, cut costs, and help keep millions of drivers on the move. Highway officials and road crews in Des Moines and Ames, Iowa, will test the Maintenance Decision Support System (MDSS) February 3 to April 4. The MDSS uses several computer models to project hour-by-hour weather and road conditions up to two days in advance, with an update every three hours."
For once, the US goverment spends some money in something useful to the society in general. :)
These are great measures against the deaths and injuries that every year happen in every road. That's something that the EU countries should copy from the US
KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid!
It isn't intended for the use of drivers, but rather those who maintain and clear the roads. In other words, those who do the salting, sanding, plowing etc.
I used to live on a mountain and came down several times a week. It would often start snowing while I was off the mountain and I would call the Highway Patrol to ask about the roads. There were 2 highways I could take and, invariably, the Highway Patrol would tell me that both were unsafe and that I should not drive on either.
Luckily, I only took their word for it the first time. I drove a Geo Metro (the only way I could afford the gas with the mileage I was putting on at the time) and never had any problem whatsoever with either highway.
I hope this system doesn't default to "roads are unsafe" or else people will stop bothering to check.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... or some other such communication system were used. It could be set up on Highway Patrol cars (already on the road) and send up to the minute data combined with GPS for location.
So, if you had (n)cars on the road in a given area, you could tell the weather at all the doughnut shops in the state.
At first I though? What? Why are they testing this in Iowa? Then, I saw the light . . .
As a Des Moines native and a student at Iowa State University in Ames, I can see why they picked these roads. The sections of highway that were picked for this test have very predictable traffic patterns. One can always count on the Des Moines "rush-15-minutes" and the commute from surrounding small towns to Des Moines. By using roads in a smaller city, with very predictable traffic patterns, the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Federal Highway Administration have eliminated many of the variables associated with larger cities.
Of course, this probably means that Iowa State University will be less likely to cancel classes due to poor road conditions . . . but I'm a Computer Engineer, so it's not like I have anything better to do than to go to class. :-)
However, a system which aims to provide better information about traffic congestion to individual drivers can have the unexpected consequence of making congestion worse --- one study by Mahmassani and Jayakrishnan showed that when individuals use a best response strategy the performance of the system as a whole degrades if more than 25% of drivers have access to real time traffic information.
We show how this concentration effect works in a paper on the El Farol bar problem titled "Coordination Failure as a Source of Congestion in Information Networks" (download from here) --- when agents have "too much" information they are unable to successfully coordinate their behavior.
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
Why is it that everybody assumes that just because you put something on the Internet that everybody is going to abandon tradition means and jump to the site in droves? This is the same mentality that cause the whole dot-com boom/bust.
This article seems to call these systems Maintenance Decision Support Systems (MDSS). But the term I am used to seeing is Road Weather Information System (RWIS), which are used for the same reasons. I guess that RWIS's could be part of MDSS's; Pennsylvania (as well as other states) use theirs to help predict where to send snowplows, etc.
RWIS's are also often found online. Pennsylvania's RWIS is online here. You can click on any region, click on a station, and get live video, if the road is wet ("chemcial wet"==salted), what the temperature/wind speed is, etc. Pennsylvania also has self-salting bridges in a few spots; I don't know of any in other states, but it just might be me.
Ohio (not listed as an MDSS member) also has their own RWIS system (also called RWIS), although it presently covers only a few select areas.
I should note that even if you check a RWIS/MDSS, be aware that weather conditions can change quickly. The National Weather Service and the MDSS/RWIN you use might show only light snow, but don't be surprised if you have to seek shelter in a hotel overnight.
...we've had this kind of service offered by Finnish Road Administartion for years, I believe it was opened in 98-99 or so. It's in English too, you can check it out here. It has been a great help many times. Especially those dozens of almost-real-time weather cameras by roads all over the country are very nifty. This one, for example, is quite near where I was born. Pretty sad picture at the moment :(
It would be great if they could combine this system with a traffic monitoring system. I would rather know the traffic 20 minutes in advance. It would be great if my navigation system would tell me, "take these back roads, you dont want to see whats coming ahead..." or "you might as well stay home for an extra 1/2 hour..."