 We have about, or 16,400 plus miles of state highways. We're the 12th largest state highway system in the nation. And then just a little bit on the topography of Arkansas. A lot of mountainous regions, rolling hills and a nice flat delta region. A lot of different terrain as far as where we're building our roads and a lot of different terrain to analyze when we're looking at our crash data. So I want to do a few statistics about our crash data before I go into the tools that we're using. So here's a chart showing the total number of crashes in the state and total roads versus just the state highway system for the past 10 years. You guys can see about 60% of all crashes in Arkansas occur on our state highway system. 70% of all crashes in the state, total crashes, occur in our urban areas. And then 70% of all crashes that happen in the state that have a fatality involve occur in our rural areas. And 2 thirds of those are roadway departure related. There were 550 crash fatalities in Arkansas last year. This next chart kind of gives a comparison on how our fatality rate versus the national fatality rate. And you guys can see we're just a little bit above what the national fatality rate is. All this being said, with our crash location tool, it's very important for our new initiative toward zero death to make sure that we have all the spatial information that we need in order to make our route safer for our traveling public. So I'm going to go over kind of past to present the different kind of tools that we've used in the past to locate our crashes. And then I'll be introducing our new tool that we're going to use. So we've been progressively implementing new methods over the years. And so for the next few slides I'm just going to show what we've done from the 1970s through 2011 before the implementation of our new tool. So in the 1970s the department was tasked with locating and maintaining all the locations for crash events on the state highway system in Arkansas and just on the state highway system. So for this purpose the department decided to record each crash event with that event's county route section and log mile location so they could be found and studied on the highway system since the system uses the same county route section and log mile setup. And we live by the log mile here at the Arkansas Highway Department. The department partnered with the state police and local county and city law enforcement to make sure that they could locate each crash with its needed attributes including an accurate log mile of where the crash event occurred. So we were relying on other law enforcement. Law enforcement that weren't familiar, very familiar anyway with the log mile system to get a log mile for us. So this slide shows one of the earliest tools that we would use which is our county route and section map. It only shows the state highway system on the map. Of course it has the beginning and ending log mile for each segment of highway and it has a log mile for all the bridges on the map. So we were asking them to give us an accurate log mile for a crash location based on these maps. You guys can imagine how difficult that was for them. But there was a backup. And we also here at the department we had crash locator positions and they had to relocate all those crashes that happened on the state highway system. So next we also had our tabular road inventory information in these big books that they were able to flip through. And for each route wherever it intersected another state highway system of course there was a log mile listed. And then events that happened on the route. So number of lane changes, ADT changes, there were log miles listed for that. As you guys can see from the picture, very difficult to understand. Our crash locators here at the department could hardly understand it so it was very difficult for us to think that other law enforcement were going to be able to understand it also. So once again every crash had to be relocated here at the department even though we were getting a log mile from our law enforcement. So we also provided static printed maps and our workers here would write in the log mile wherever there was an intersection with another route. So we would take these maps, we would hang them up with the city so they would have a static map on their wall to better locate a log mile but those maps could be out of date. As early as the next day there's always system changes on the highways so this is not a very efficient way to get it done. So next we offered that we could make these maps, we didn't have to hand write anymore, we could use microstation and we could put log miles in of where routes intersected the state highway system so they could have a better feel of what log miles were available for them to choose from for the crash locations. Once again maps could be out of date very quickly and even though these were available digitally most cities still relied on their printed versions that were hanging up on their wall. So in 2004 we realized the power of our linear referencing system and how it could help our crash locators here at the department locate exact log miles of where crashes occurred digitally in our GIS software. So we set up the program with our CAD maps. We had our linear referencing system on top of those CAD maps so they could see intersecting routes with our state highway system. They could hover along using a tool called LRS Precision Location as they hovered along the state route they could get an exact route, section, and log mile of where their point was. Very helpful for our crash locators here at the department but we couldn't share this tool with law enforcement because they didn't have the software and not the knowledge either of the linear referencing system so still we were in a continuous cycle of us having to relocate all crashes that happened on the state highway system to make sure we were getting an accurate log mile. We were lucky our Arkansas Geographic Information Office had gotten with the counties and they had developed a 9-1-1 centerline routing system for the state. So thank goodness we had a whole state network that was attributed with road names and such so we could utilize that with our linear referencing system and they would be able to see the routes, their attributes, their names to still better identify a crash location but once again that was a tool that we could only use here at the department and other law enforcement just couldn't get to it. So we also tried during that time GPS units. We bought 50 GPS units, sent them out with the state police and we wanted to do a trial period. Maybe they can use these GPS units, take a reading at the crash scene, get a lat long for that crash, get it into the system and then we would have a latitude and longitude that we then we could convert to log mile for our report. So we tried this for about three months. We gathered the data. I've heard this from many other states. When we got the data back and mapped it, a lot of those dots landed in the state police parking lot or they had moved to the side of the road so in other parking lots where they were, it just wasn't convenient, it wasn't going to work. Not necessarily the law enforcement fault, they didn't realize how important this was to us to make sure that we had these correct locations and there was minimal training when we did give them those GPS units. So just a little bit about our linear referencing system, which was a major player in the tool that I'll be introducing in just a minute. So as I said before, over 16,000 miles state highways on our highway system, 12th largest in the nation and also included on our linear referencing system our over 15,000 miles of other routes eligible for federal aid. So what you're looking at here on the screen is pretty much our functional class system. So all routes eligible for federal aid is what we have currently on our linear referencing system. So our linear referencing system sure works like most other DOTs. We assign the route with the county route section and beginning and ending log mile. The concatenation of the county route and section and the log mile information is its unique value or its primary key field. And then we can map different things from around the department that also have that same primary information such as job status, information from our road inventory, and of course crashes. So updating the LRS, 177 changes were made just in 2012 on the state highway system. We have removed routes, added routes, relocated routes, and often a lot of re-log routes throughout the year. We keep a live version of our linear referencing system open to everybody here, but we also keep archived copies. We started archiving our linear referencing system in the year 2000. So we can always go backwards to see what the system looked like back then, which is helpful, we just received the 2011 statewide crash data. So we can't use current linear referencing system to locate on. We're still locating crashes that happened in 2012. So we do have to keep these archived copies to make sure that we're locating in the correct year that the events occurred. And so let's look at one of our typical crash reports that we get here at the highway department that happened on the state system that we have to relocate. Of course all the information here, you see a little narrative about where the crash happened and a little diagram. This particular crash that happened on US Highway 82 in Columbia County, Section 3B Log Mile 2.20. So we're going to relocate this crash and see how the law enforcement did out in the field. Okay, so from the narrative we see where the red circle is in the middle of the map, that this is approximately where that crash happened. But they said it happened at Log Mile 2.20, but this route only goes to Log Mile 1.65. So it couldn't have happened. So we're going to have to relocate this. Okay, so after our locators got ahold of it, we relocated it to say now it happened on Highway 79, Section 1, at Log Mile 18.26. Those are going to be sent back to our state police. The location is going to be re-entered into the database for the correct crash location. So once again that's a prime example of how difficult it is for our law enforcement to give us the correct Log Mile. So back in 2011, February of 2011, one of our county offices, Pope County Sheriff's Office called, we just had a big snowstorm. We were still waiting for the snow to go away. And they said, hey, we need that map that we're supposed to use to locate crashes by Log Mile on the state system. Can you tell me where that is? So we directed into the route and section map that they've used. And he said, hey, is there an easier way? And that very day we sat down and we came up with an easier way. And we don't blame them for asking. In this instance, here's a route that's about 19 miles long. There's no Log Miles in between for them to guess, so they have to use the little section lines to kind of guess where that Log Mile could be. And they have 52 different fields of information per crash to enter in. A Log Mile is not necessarily on their radar as the most important field. So a lot of human error and then our locators having to relocate all those crashes, sometimes we weren't getting those locations in time to really do some real-time analysis with our data. So making it easier. So what we did is we took our linear referencing system that included all routes eligible for federal aid around the state. And we asked our GIS platform, GeoMedia. We asked GeoMedia to put a point every 100 feet along the linear referencing system. So when it did that, each point was populated with the county throughout the section in the exact Log Mile of that point. So then we said, okay, well let's make this a little bit better. So let's attach some of our road inventory data to those points also. So now with county route and section and the exact Log Mile of that point, was other information that was going to be very useful to the law enforcement to fill into their reports also. Well then we took the points and we said, hey, let's shove these out to a KML file for display in Google Earth. So we did that through our program. And as you can see from the screen, in the red we have what's on the state system. In the blue dots we have what other routes eligible for federal aid or the rest of our functional class system. And you're able to click on those dots in Google Earth and see the exact information that was generated in our GIS platform. Of course these are KML files. We can email them out to anybody. You know, email them out to family members they would be able to see. So we started emailing these out to our state police for them to be able to give us a more accurate Log Mile of where their crash events occurred. And it's just worked out wonderfully. We also included our city limits. As you guys can see in the top left of your screen, there is a field they have to fill out to say whether or not it's in the city or out of the city. And if it's out of the city they have to measure how far out of the city it's out of. So we have our city limits available to them. Instead of just being able to locate on Main Lane, they can now see the Log Mile on Frontage Road and on Ramps. And of course they have Google Street View available in here to be able to help them better locate where they are in the field. And of course this allows them, if they have connection, they can locate right there in their vehicle at the scene of the crash. If there's no time, they can always come back to the office and of course use this tool also to locate the incident. In this case, this is a pretty long bridge that we have here in the state, 430 Bridge. The beginning Log Mile of the bridge was 9.87. You guys can see in the graph on the corner of the screen. So we had a lot of accidents that happened at 9.87 on that bridge. But as you guys can see, every 100 feet along that bridge, that's a lot of dots. It's almost two miles long. So they're able to give us a more accurate Better Log Mile when they're out in the field. Not only are the law enforcement outside of the highway department using this, but also our crash locators are taking advantage of this tool and now using it to locate those crashes. So how can everyone use this tool? We can email out the KML to everybody. We have an FTP site that's open to the public. Anybody can download those KML files. We also have all these points or dots, every 100 feet, available on Arkansas GIS Clearing House called Geostore. In addition to that, our Arkansas Geographic Information Office offered us to offer this data available on our GIS online. So we have all of our dots in there. There's a link that anyone can click on and go in there and see the same exact information that was offered in the KML files. And also, our GIS online can be used in their smartphones also. So if they don't have their laptop open or a good connection, they can also use their smartphones to be able to see that information. So the use of the LRS location tool or our new crash location tool, the training and outreach to law enforcement agencies started in June of 2011, so just three months after we came up with the methodology. All of the state police agencies are using this, which account for 25% of all crashes statewide or about 40% of crashes on our highway system are being located using this tool. And we constantly reach out to counties and cities. Right now it's just a volunteer basis for local law enforcement to use it, but we have about 42 of those agencies that have started to utilize it, and we've gotten very positive feedback. So once we have the data, our better locations that we have, of course, numerous planning studies are done in order to figure out, hey, do we need a passing lane here? Do we need more lanes here? Maybe a turning lane here to make things safer. Maybe some rumble strips. And then we can also run all kinds of queries as far as types of crashes to be able to look for areas that might need to be paid attention to for more safety initiatives to take place. As far as safety initiatives, having this data, having these locations and a more exact location for us, we've been able to prove that different things such as cable median barriers need to be installed in more areas around the state. Rumble strips need to be installed, especially on some of our two lane rule highways. We're run off the road crashes. We're very prevalent. And then we have one more tool that we started using. It's called Intergraph Incident Analyst. It's been able to help us identify clusters and locations, areas that we really need to pay attention to, that we haven't been able to find as quickly without this software. So case in point, this is a study we did in Jacksonville, Arkansas. We had to make a map for our administration so they could see the clusters of crashes that happened in Jacksonville. The map on the left, you guys can see all the clusters of crashes, the yellow dots there. This map took about four hours for us to put together. A lot of these crashes happened at the same exact log mile, so the dots are just right on top of each other in our GIS platform. So we exported out to our CAD. We took those dots. We moved them around so we could produce those clusters. So once again, about four hours. But with Incident Analyst's hotspot analysis tool, in our GIS platform, it took about two minutes for it to generate this hotspot map for us. You guys can see that the two maps compare very well with the clusters. On the right-hand side, the hotspots in the red are showing where those clusters are that you guys can see on the map on the left in the yellow. And then there's also an Incident Count tool. You can count incidents within any boundary area, so in this case, we're using counties. You can also do cities. We do a lot of house and senate districts if our legislators want to know where most of the accidents are happening within their jurisdictions. And there's also a repeat incident tool that we use to run. This is on a statewide basis, but we can run it on any size project area in the state. But it lets us know quickly where repeat incidents happen over and over again at the same log mile location. So we can really focus on those areas and do some study analysis to find out if there are some safety issues within those areas. They do have a tool in there also called Change Over Time. It kind of plays a little movie for you, what happens with these incidents. I just did January through June for this. It's in PowerPoint, but once again, imagine it's a movie. When I flipped to February, keep in mind that we had a pretty big snowstorm this year, so a lot of crashes happened that month. And there's also temporal reporting. It makes nice charts for us to be able to show where the majority of the crashes happen. So at the top you see months of the year in the middle of the day of the week and then on the bottom time of day crashes that happened. And this helps us put together nice figures, especially for public involvement. We use this at a public involvement meeting. We did hot spots of the crashes on this particular study segment. We wanted the public to know that we know that there are a concentration of crashes that happen in this area. And it's under study and we have plans in place to rectify that. And also we had our temporal reporting on top of that figure. Okay, in the future, a methodology will be in place by June 2013 to include all public roads in our linear referencing system. So from our about 30,000 miles that we have available now in our linear referencing system, approximately 110,000 miles will be included in there. You can see from the figure in the red, this is about how much we have to add. About 74,000 miles we're going to have to add for our linear referencing system. But when that's done, we guesstimate in approximately five years, we'll be able to locate all crashes in the state, not just on our federal aid system. Safety initiatives, there's nothing like having more data to do analysis with to find out what needs to happen. Of course, the dual carriageway system will be put in place along with that linear referencing system that each divided highway will have two center lines. Road inventory will include complete data for log direction and anti-log direction. Right now we can only map on our linear referencing system based on one center line. But as you guys know, FHWA has asked us to do dual carriageway along with an all public roads linear referencing system. And in 2014, the highway department along with the Arkansas State Police will start implementing eCrash, which was developed by the Center for Advanced Public Safety, or CAPS, at the University of Alabama for a paperless electronic submission of crash reports. eCrash will have an actually map click tool that our law enforcement will be able to use in their vehicles that will be able to click on the location. It will give a latitude and longitude of that crash, but they are going to be using our points, every 100 feet point, within the map click tool also for log mile information. And this is just to illustrate, we're just skimming the surface of what we can do and look at all the potential that's ahead of us, especially when we get our all public roads linear referencing system. And contact information right here for more information on the Intergrastio Media or Incident Analyst, James O. Brown from InterGraph, and then more information on eCrash. There's a link on there for you to look at also. And then I'm happy to answer any questions. Thanks, Sharon. I'm going to go ahead and open up the line for a question and answer. This conference is now in question and answer mode. To alert the speaker that you have a question, press 1, then 0. Each question will be asked in the order it was received. So you should have heard some instructions. If you've got a question on the phone line, just press 1 and then 0. You can also enter in questions into our chat pod, especially if you're listening through the computer. Let me just quickly see if we've got questions on the phone. We don't have any questions on the phone right now, but let me see. So Sharon, you mentioned that one of the issues that you had, rolling out different, the first couple attempts at something like this, the training seemed to play a role or trying to understand how the users, especially the state police, were going to try to enter in the information. It sounds like what you have now, it was much easier, but are there still issues you're running into in terms of getting that location information? Well, it's true right now when they click on one of those dots and see the information they have to enter in their report, they do still have to enter that in by looking at what they see in the crash location tool in Google Earth and typing it in. So there's a lot of human error in there, but aside from that, we've been constantly checking the locations that have come from this new crash location tool and the department's made a decision that as long as they use this tool, which there's a check mark they can check to say they use the tool, we don't have to relocate those crashes anymore, which means for us that we're getting our data, our crash data, instead of a year and a half later, we expect to see our crash data eight months after the year ends instead of a year and a half later. And then we hope in the future it just comes on faster. Because I know a lot of states are, that's one of the issues is trying to either make it easier for the, especially the state police, they're involved in entering a lot of this information, making it easier for them to somehow put that in. And that's why we're looking forward to eCrash with the map click tool. It's a paperless system. When they click, a lot of our road inventory information and of course that log mile information will automatically be entered into the report through the eCrash system. Looks like we have a question, a user that uses ArcMap, they want to know. Right, so yeah, we do have ArcMap here at the highway department that GeoMedia is our GIS platform. So I hope maybe that somebody else that's on the conference would be able to answer that question. I know that ArcMap has the capability for hotspotting, but I am not quite sure exactly where that is. How did you learn about Incident and Analyst product? How did you find out about that? They actually, InterGraph actually was advertising it, a lot of like a crime location tool where incidents happen over and over again. And then they worked with Ohio data and they kind of started advertising it as a hotspot tool for crash analysis. So when we saw the presentation, we knew that it could be a good tool for us to be able to take advantage of for hotspotting. Let me just quickly check on the phone line to see if we've got any questions. Chief David. Hello. You got a question? Yeah. What's your name? It's David Lawler with T.Dot. Okay. What's your question? I think that we had seen that tool that InterGraph started with maybe about a year or two years ago. Right. It looked good. They've come up with another tool that we built inside of what we call our CREM system. And after that data is collected, it goes into a repository at the Department of Safety. Then we extract the data and put it into what we call our CREM's site over here in T.Dot where we put all of our crash data. And that includes location data. The county route, log mile, and et cetera. And we, they came up with a automatic, it's an automatic updater inside of our trends. And it looks for all the electronic reports that's inside the Titan database at the Department of Safety. And it extracts those and pulls them over. Now what, if there's a tolerance problem or the officer can't get the right location out in the field, and we've got, the officer's got a map it to that was built by IDMF, or the vendor was. And it's probably about what you're using too. We've got a, where the officer's sitting there and he can take a Google map and find the location. He can go up and click on the spot where the wreck is and then draw it back to where his car is sitting. And we've got a pretty good accuracy rate with that. Now all the troopers have got them. And now they're starting to go out into the other agencies. Into the local agencies? Yeah, yes. The county's in the cities. We are getting fairly good with the cities. They're getting better all the time. We're just about, I think, about 80% electronic now. You remember, Kim? It's close to that. Yeah. About 80% electronic. We still got some paper stuff that has to be handled in a different way. But we're very, we're happy with the tool. It looks good. And we also have a contract with Integralfe too. So that door is always open there for them to come up with that too. Right now, depending on the GPS stuff coming off the electronic reports out in the field. And it seems to be working pretty good. It's fast. Yeah, I'm very pleased with Google. Thank goodness it's free. Hey, man. It will not exist, but very happy with it. I see another question up here, Mark. What accuracy level are you shooting for? Plus or minus 50 feet with our crashes? Yes, that would be wonderful. In fact, our accuracy level, since we did a point every 100 feet, our accuracy level, before this tool started with our law enforcement, we were sometimes finding up to a half mile it could be off, which, you know, things change on the system very frequently. So that just was not going to do for us. So yes, plus or minus 50 feet is wonderful. But we're finding that we're getting our crashes very nearly where they exactly happened. Again, if you've got questions on the computer, you can put them into our chat pod. So I want to make a quick plug too. I think back in 2011, Tennessee was actually one of a couple of states that participated in a peer exchange that we did on GIS and highway safety. And we've got a summary report on our website. The website, if you look on the lower left corner of your screen, is GIS.fhwa.dot.gov. And if you go to there and if you click on Resources and then click on Reports, you'll scroll down. You should see a report, a link to a report that looks at what several states have done. Massachusetts, Washington, Ohio, Maine, Tennessee, Illinois, and Minnesota. Sounds like it might be worthwhile to kind of do a follow-up case study report or peer exchange and see what where states are nowadays. And I think I'd definitely include what you're the work that you're doing, Sharon. Let me just check to see if we've got any other questions on the phone. Well, we don't have any other questions on the phone right now. Let me just click it back to your contact info, Sharon. Were there any, I don't know, last, you know... Well, I know that the PowerPoint is going to be available to download from the participants. So I just want to let everybody know I had a lot of graphics in here, but at the bottom of each slide in the PowerPoint, I wrote down very particular notes about what each slide is showing if they'd like to download that. Yeah, actually, go ahead. I'm just going to say we're available anytime to answer questions. Once again, I don't think it matters what GIS platform you have. This tool is very easy methodology to put together, but if anybody has any questions, please feel free to contact us. To download the file, you should be able to see a file download window. If you click on the file name, and then click on the Save to My Computer button, you should be able to download the copy of this presentation. It looks like people have started answering some of our poll questions. And this, again, this helps us give some ideas of what kinds of webcasts everyone would be interested in participating in. Also, if you've got ideas for a case-tie report or a peer exchange or something that could be, that we need to highlight in a better fashion, just let me know. My email address is on the lower left corner. I want to thank Sharon Hawkins again for agreeing to do this presentation. Like she mentioned, I guess Sharon, you did this presentation back at GIST, is that correct? Yes, sir, yes. Yeah, so there were several, a lot of good presentations that were done there, and that's one of the things that we try to do, especially for people who weren't able to make it out to this year's symposium, which was in Boise, Idaho. We try to get some of those presentations and make them available as webcasts. Like was mentioned earlier, the presentation is going to be available to download. We're also recording this, so we'll send a link out to a recording of this presentation. Let me see. One last check for questions on the phone. Okay. Well, I think we're all set then. Sharon's information is contact info is on the screen. Thank you, Sharon, again. And thank you to everyone for calling in, logging in, and participating. Please feel free to fill in the questions, answer the questions as best you can. And I want to wish everyone a good day. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Sharon.