Challenge

The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission operates and maintains a system of 552 miles of roadway within the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In its early days, the turnpike posted a callbox every mile for its entire length so motorists could alert authorities of accidents or safety issues along the road. A towing service was dispatched from authorized service stations near the highway, and Pennsylvania State Police patrolled the turnpike as part of routine rounds.

Since that time, the turnpike has attracted far more motorists, with hundreds of thousands of travelers using its roadways every day. Over time, as traffic has increased, managing maintenance, customer service, construction, and safety has become increasingly complex. Though the Commission was collecting a vast volume of data related to mobility and incident volume, any analysis or reporting on operations required manual processing. And a lack of access meant the people who needed it faced an onerous task of finding relevant data among disparate sources.

The Commission wanted to automate the way it managed performance metrics and generated reports on a recurring and as-needed basis. It wanted to give leaders real-time insights into specific views of the data – including highway safety, incident causation, traffic, and mobility – that would help them make decisions to improve operations and save lives.

Solution

The PA Turnpike Commission selected CAI to help develop a series of performance dashboards that would allow leaders to better monitor performance and make decisions about critical operations. The dashboards integrate performance metrics from multiple, disparate data sources and reporting processes that, until now, provided limited insight into operational performance.

CAI built a suite of easy-to-use dashboards, including:

• The Highway Safety Dashboard provides visibility into the causes of incidents with the objective of eliminating accidents along the turnpike. The dashboard integrates metrics related to weather conditions, road service conditions, injury severity, level of illumination, vehicle types, and driver’s age.
• The Incident Timeline Dashboard provides metrics to assist in managing and improving incident response with multiple views across a range of metrics, including incident elapsed time, first-responder response time, roadway clearance time, incident clearance time, and time to normal traffic conditions, with filters for associated data such as weather, location, time, day, incident type, injuries, and fatalities.
• The Construction Analytics Dashboard provides visibility into performance metrics that allow for more effective contractor management, project risk mitigation, and construction program communications.
• The Executive Dashboard for Safety gathers critical metrics related to the Commission’s strategic focus on safety. The dashboard includes executive views of safety scorecards that enable tracking and analysis of highway and work zone crashes, employee safety and associated lost-time injuries, and equipment safety and accident trends in the workplace.
• The Mobility Dashboard integrates KPIs related to mobility and traffic to enable the Commission’s Traffic Engineering & Operations team to monitor and improve the level of service on the highway. The dashboard provides operational data on highway bottlenecks, traveler planning time, congestion indicators, and travel time measurements. A related executive dashboard provides executive-level views of similar mobility measurements along with metrics related to toll collection and high-level Incident timeline metrics, such as roadway and incident clearance time.
• The Customer Service Dashboard provides metrics to assist in monitoring the performance of call center operations.
• The Work Zone Dashboard provides insights into work-zone safety, helping leaders determine and communicate information about locations where incidents are more likely to occur and promote safety awareness with travelers.

Benefits

Managing the PA Turnpike is about managing many complex factors. Pulling the Commission’s data together into a series of dashboards allows the tolling, safety, HR, and customer service teams access to data they lacked before. Not only can they view data from multiple sources at the same time, but they can also display data in charts that are most appropriate for analysis. The dashboards also dramatically improve the quality of the Commission’s data, helping operators enter better data more consistently.

With quick access to dashboards that consolidate and simplify data, decision-makers now have improved visibility into what is happening on the road in real-time, can respond more efficiently, and improve operations and safety going forward. The Commission can now identify and eliminate non-essential activities, reduce the risk of construction sites, and improve the level of service to its customers.