During peak season, special events, and disaster recoveries, our nation’s public lands can become overwhelmed with visitors. This can lead to numerous negative impacts and risks to visitors, staff, facilities/infrastructure, and the natural resource itself. To mitigate these impacts, and to proactively plan for high visitation, the Volpe Public Lands Team has been working with several public lands to plan for, pilot, and evaluate transportation technology solutions to understand visitor travel patterns and to inform visitor’s decisions before they leave for their destination and while they are en route. These solutions have the potential to improve visitor experience and reduce negative impacts during peak times and throughout the year.
Project contact: Eric Englin and Ben Rasmussen
The Volpe Center supports the National Park Service (NPS) to improve transportation information for visitors. One way to improve traveler information is to ensure that visitors receive up-to-date transportation information via third-party navigation applications, like Google and Apple Maps. Volpe supports two NPS data feed projects to improve transportation information in third-party navigation applications: the Road Closure and Incidents Alerts Application and the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) project.
Road Closure and Incidents Alerts Application
Inclement weather and natural disasters, vehicle crashes, and road work can all lead to unpassable and unsafe roads. Closing these roads to users and communicating these closures to visitors on third-party navigation applications is essential to improving visitor experience and safety.
Working with the NPS to address these challenges, Volpe created a pilot Work Zone Data Exchange (WZDx) feed to support Mojave National Preserve during recovery from roadway damage from monsoons in 2022. Over the next year, Volpe supported NPS to scale this effort and create the Road Closures and Incidents Alerts Application (Figure 1). This application is now available to all parks. It automatically generates an alert to the NPS.gov park webpage and updates a Transportation Data Exchange (TDx) feed of all road closures in the NPS Application Programming Interface (API), which can be consumed by anyone, including third-party navigation applications.
Since the service-wide application was deployed in Fall 2023, Volpe has been supporting NPS in sharing information with park staff about the application, troubleshooting, and providing feedback on the application.
Figure 1: Road closure alert on NPS.gov map
GTFS
Volpe also supported NPS in piloting static General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), a widely accepted transit data standard, at over ten park transit systems in 2023. GTFS feeds consist of a series of text files that communicate transit information, including agency data, routes, and schedules, so that visitors can more easily take transit during their visit. Over the next year, Volpe will support NPS in expanding the GTFS pilot. This will include static GTFS feeds at all major park transit systems, as well as pilot real-time GTFS at several parks.
Contact: Eric Englin and Sophie Abo
Indiana Dunes National Park (INDU) is an urban NPS unit located along Lake Michigan in Northwest Indiana. INDU’s park boundaries span from Michigan City in the east to the City of Gary in the west across La Porte, Porter, and Lake counties, comprised of 15 miles of beaches across eight sites and over 50 miles of trails across 14 hiking trail systems throughout its 15,000 acres. INDU’s land is noncontinuous, intersected by both privately-owned and State-owned land at several points, which makes it challenging to navigate. If parking is full in one area, it may take a visitor over an hour to find parking elsewhere.
Since May 2022, Volpe’s Public Lands Team has been assisting INDU by piloting phase 1 of a Smart Parking ITS pilot project. The goal of the project is to improve transportation convenience, efficiency, and safety for visitors who plan to use NPS parking lots to access beaches, trailheads, educational centers, and other park resources. Phase 1 of the pilot project installed several types of parking guidance sensors at nine heavily congested, popular beach/trail access parking areas throughout the park to address various traffic and parking congestion challenges (Figure 2). The Smart Parking ITS communicates real-time parking space availability data at select parking areas with a centralized database at INDU’s Visitor Center. The information is available to park management and staff as well as the public via a website and through a display screen located at the visitor center.
Figure 2: Installing an inductive loop counter in Indiana Dunes National Park
The project aims to better manage parking by improving communication of parking availability across INDU’s existing parking resources by directing visitors to available parking through the delivery of real-time parking information data. The goal for this season is to improve upon the system technology that was in place the past two seasons to create a more permanent, stable system that visitors can rely on for consistent traveler information communications.
Contact: Emily Maciejak and Ben Rasmussen
Volpe’s Public Lands Team is always exploring new ways to improve the use of data and analytics in transportation planning. Over a 12-month period starting September 2022, Volpe piloted StreetLight Data (StreetLight) to analyze visitor transportation patterns in public lands. StreetLight aggregates raw traveler data from location-based services (LBS) providers and Connected Vehicle Data (CVD), and they can provide detailed regional and local travel flow data in many areas across the nation. StreetLight’s platform provides a dashboard that enables a variety of analysis types using the built-in tools and web application as well as the downloadable traveler data for use in on our own systems.
Volpe’s Public Lands Team piloted the use of StreetLight data through nine different projects. The projects required a variety of different data needs generally ranging from understanding vehicle activity at a location, origin-destination pairs, popular travel routes between two locations, parking lot usage, visitation and demographic trends, and pedestrian and bicyclist habits. The projects also included a variety of geographical contexts including urban areas, rural parks, and seasonal destinations. The results varied based on the project, but the pilot was generally successful. Below are highlights from three projects where Volpe used StreetLight last year.
- A project in Washington, DC, along Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, which reverses direction to serve commuting traffic, used StreetLight data to better understand the origin and destination of the vehicles using the corridor. This analysis helped Volpe predict which corridors vehicles would divert to if the reversible lane operation were eliminated along the corridor (Figure 3). Through StreetLight, this origin-destination data was available at a fraction of the cost and with significantly higher accuracy than other best practices, such as providing GPS devices to drivers or region-wide vehicle tracking methods.
Figure 3. StreetLight’s Top Routes analysis showing how vehicles enter the corridor (top) and how they exit the corridor (bottom) during the morning inbound commuting period (Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, Washington, DC)
- At Acadia National Park, the Volpe team explored StreetLight data to supplement more traditional data collection methods to track parking lot utilization and vehicle counts throughout the park. Since the park is in a more remote location and has relatively low vehicle volume, the LBS cell phone coverage was unreliable. When StreetLight switched to CVD for more recent time periods, the data became more stable but challenging to compare with the previous LBS data.
- Volpe used StreetLight data to study existing vehicle travel on the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire. The study focused on Tripoli Road, which is closed in the winter, to inform a feasibility analysis of future infrastructure and operations management decisions. Volpe used the relative percentage of trips along three alternate routes to predict how visitors access Waterville Valley town, the resort area, and the Tripoli Road corridor itself (Figure 4). The data showed that Tripoli Road is unlikely to be a useful alternative based on traveler origins if it were open in winter. The team used these results to help the Forest Service decide to make maintenance and safety investments for the road, without changing the seasonal nature of its operation.
Figure 4: Seasonal variation for the three vehicle trip destinations of Waterville Valley town, the resort area, and the Tripoli Road corridor within the White Mountain National Forest
In sum, StreetLight and other emerging data sources offer many benefits including access to historical and near-real-time data, understanding trip routes and travel patterns, and eliminating the need to maintain physical equipment. However, these data sources also come with challenges including evolving raw data sources and questions around privacy, and coverage in remote locations which often include public lands. Volpe will continue to explore the advantages and evaluate these benefits and risks in future projects as much as possible.
Contact: Michael Littman
What public lands projects are you working on now? What has been your favorite?
I manage our NPS Intermountain Region portfolio, which in my opinion has some of the coolest, as well as some of the most interesting, parks from a transportation perspective! I’m very excited to visit a few of them this summer. I also work with the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the NPS Chesapeake Gateways Network, and they all bring something unique and valuable to our public spaces.
What types of projects outside of public lands do you work on?
I’m a civil engineer by training and spent my career prior to joining Volpe working on public transit and intelligent transportation systems as a consultant for state and local governments across the country. Since coming to Volpe, I’ve really enjoyed bringing this experience to the federal level, providing technical support to both the Federal Transit Administration and the Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office on topics ranging from early planning for transit capital investments to the potential safety and mobility benefits of a network of interoperable, connected vehicles.
What are your fondest memories of public lands?
My husband and I went to Alaska for our honeymoon. We spent time in Glacier Bay and Denali National Parks, and the vast landscapes were the perfect place to relax and reconnect. And now, we’re in the process of forming new memories at our local public lands – this summer, we’re embarking on our city’s Visit Every Park Challenge with our two-year-old daughter (Figure 5), which will include visiting every single park in Ann Arbor (and there are 162 of them, so I may have to report back!).
What new public land have you discovered since working at Volpe?
I’ve discovered multiple new public lands and have learned so much more about the nine Federal land management agencies we work with while working on the Federal and Tribal Lands chapter of the FHWA Conditions and Performance Report. Federal and Tribal lands make up approximately 30% of the country’s total land area, support multiple uses and missions, and include a substantial number of roads, bridges, trails, and transit systems. There is such a variety in the use and conditions of these assets that it’s hard to capture it all.
What’s the most unique, interesting, or strangest job you had before working at Volpe?
I served as a poll worker during the 2020 election, which was probably the fastest 16 hours of my life. It was very busy, as we had a line out the door for most of the day. I was so focused that when I stepped outside to take a lunch break, I accidentally tried to eat my sandwich while still wearing my mask. That being said, I hope to serve again in a future election because it was a very rewarding experience and I learned so much about how our election process works on the ground.
If you were to have a job that wasn’t transportation or public lands related, what would it be?
Especially during the early pandemic days, I started thinking that I would really enjoy being a mail carrier. I love organizing, find joy in spending time outside and going for walks around neighborhoods, and would have fun making polite small talk and silly jokes with people along my route. But as a Californian living in Michigan, I’m not sure whether I could handle the “neither rain nor sleet nor snow…” aspect of it!
Figure 5: Katie and her family
Contact: Katie McLaughlin
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