IT'S ALL IN THERE : NJDOT MANAGES HIGHWAY MAINTENANCE

The New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT) solved a massive data collection challenge by having two agencies share information and update old techniques to be usable in new maintenance and asset management software. The Division of Operations Support purchased a system to monitor virtually all aspects of maintenance activities and enable reporting to meet government management reporting rules. The operations division worked with a separate division in Traffic Engineering and Safety, which had long used straight line diagrams (SLDs) to track roadway features. In 1996, five years earlier, the traffic engineering division had begun to transfer the SLDs from manual to electronic format. Operations decided to use the data collection techniques developed for the SLDs and structured the data along SLD lines. Consistency of data, data integration, feature inventory and a hierarchical implementation are among the elements that led to success of first phase.