In order to determine the effectiveness of their current snow removal strategy Riverside Public Works mapped their snow removal routes. Doing so provided a map of the priority streets, parking lots, and sidewalks as well as lengths of roadway included in each route.
An evaluation of the roadway lengths provided staff a better idea of the distribution of efforts. They realized there was not an even distribution of the total length of priority streets for each route, but the differences were not drastic enough to change the current strategy. They were, however, able to identify areas where staff can share portions of the routes to complete removal on all major roadways before continuing on to secondary ones.
One of the biggest challenges for local government is determining funding that will significantly cover anticipated project costs for a particular budget year. While most of this funding can be covered by a department’s budget, additional sources of money are often needed to cover new projects or programs that come up throughout the year. Federal or state grants can typically serve as a medium for this additional funding and have become a fundamental part of most local government departments. For the City of Des Plaines IL, the Model Communities grant was a recent opportunity to receive funding for implementing city programs aimed at improving the overall health of city residents.
Supported by the Cook County Department of Public Health (CCDPH) and the Public Health Institute of Metropolitan Chicago, the Model Communities Grant Program provided the city with a unique opportunity to acquire federal funding for the design and implementation of public health initiatives. Funded by a $4 million federal grant called Communities Putting Prevention to Work, the city needed to provide information, through the grant application, on why it would be an eligible candidate for part of the allotted funds.
To assist with this effort, the city’s GIS (Geographic Information Systems) department was asked to supply numerous mapping products and statistics for a wide-range of community information, including all agencies in and around the city that would benefit from the funds, the number of schools in lower income 2000 census block groups, and the percentage of minority residents within 2000 census block groups. Displaying this information through mapping products tied the statistics and numbers in the grant application to a real-world location and helped to visualize the positive impact any received funds would make.
As a result of the hard work put in by city staff members, in combination with the information and products provided from the city’s GIS, the city was recently awarded a $96,000 grant from the Model Communities program. With this money, the city hopes to supplement existing community programs and implement new ones that can help to make the city a healthier place to live.
Seasonal operations planning is a process all municipalities, large and small, must start working on as the seasons change. For the Village of Winnetka Public Works department, sidewalk snow removal has always been one of the primary services included in its winter operation plan. In past years, the snow removal area maps have been maintained in a CAD-based system, which is difficult to update and maintain. To help simplify the map update process and make it more efficient, the department asked the village’s GIS (Geographic Information System) department to recreate the maps and make them available for distribution to all plow operators.
Using GIS to assist in the development and mapping of the village’s sidewalk removal areas, the Public Works department has improved its winter operations planning efficiency and developed a more consistent operational resource for the plow operators. For these reasons, the department has decided to use GIS as its primary medium for maintain this information moving forward.
Roadway improvements have been recorded for decades in one of Elk Grove Village’s community databases. It contains much useful information such as the base and surface materials of a roadway, years in which a road was repaved, and years in which a road received some form of maintenance. This data has been integrated into the village’s GIS (Geographic Information System) to provide an interface to visualize the roadway pavement history.
The GIS allows users easy access to pavement information that can facilitate planning and scheduling of improvement projects as well as evaluation of the effectiveness of certain materials when looking at the road condition assessments. Highly accurate construction quantities can be calculated for roadway surface areas, sidewalk squares, curb lengths, and more because the village invested in base data for the GIS.
Maintaining the cleanliness of a city’s sewer system can be time intensive and costly. There is the purchase of the sewer cleaning machine, the actual flushing of the sewer lines and the occasional cutting of tree roots. With all of this work there usually comes a need for a Public Works Department to track the locations of sewer lines that have been cleaned. Tracking the clean-up progress of these lines not only allows the Public Works Director to better plan for future sewer cleaning work, it also demonstrates to the city council the efforts that have come forth by the city to remedy an on-going problem.
For the City of Park Ridge they rely on the services of the Geographic Information System (GIS) Department in order to take textual spreadsheet data and make it come to life in the form of a map. This concept is nothing new but it is something that usually tells a better story than the simply distributing handouts detailing the streets where sewer cleaning has taken place. For this project all sewer lines that were recently flushed were extracted from existing GIS sewer utility data as well as given the appropriate attributes as to when the sewer was last flushed and whether there were tree root problems or not.
Once this data was created it was then mapped out in conjunction with the city’s sewer system resulting in an end product that easily displayed the how much of the city’s sewer system had been cleaned in last six months. Additionally, the power of mapping this project out in GIS will allow the Public Works Department to track things going forward as well as retrieve statistical information on the lengths and sizes of all pipes being cleaned should they need this information at any given time.
The Village of Glencoe removes snow from the majority of it’s public sidewalks. Snow removal is done through a priority ranking system. Sidewalks that provide primary access to schools or are heavily used are designated as priority sidewalks. The remaining sidewalks are designated as secondary sidewalks. Priority sidewalks are cleared first and the secondary sidewalks are cleared after all the priority sidewalks are cleared.
Employees assigned to snow removal are given maps and written descriptions of priority sidewalks to assist them with identifying priority sidewalks. They are also given a set of maps showing where the secondary sidewalks are located. In past years there was confusion over which sidewalks needed to be cleared first. The basic issue was that the priority sidewalks are mixed in with the secondary sidewalks. Therefore, they were interested in developing a method to make it easier for employees to understand which sidewalks which need to be cleared and which ones to skip.
The Publics Works Department approached the GIS Office about creating a map book series that showed only the secondary routes. The maps need to show a different color for each of the three routes and the priority routes needed to be blacked out so employees would not accidently clear them again. The maps were created as Map Series so that pages can be quickly updated and replaced. The employees now have maps that show exactly where they need to remove snow. Thus the village was able avoid the inefficiency of removing snow from the wrong sidewalk.
Skokie is using its Geographic Information System (GIS) to aid in the bidding process for landscaped areas in the downtown area. The Village’s ability to create and manage data in addition to producing maps allows them to generate products quickly and efficiently. By creating maps of each landscaped area, the Village provides visual context to coincide with the documented extents of the service areas for the bidding contractors. In addition, these maps alleviate the need for Public Works employees to drive the contractors to each location. Having the work area limits documented both textually and visually assist both contractor and the Village in managing the service areas.
The National Flood Insurance Program’s (NFIP) Community Rating System (CRS) is a voluntary incentive that recognizes and encourages community floodplain management activities that exceed the minimum NFIP requirements. As a result, flood insurance premium rates are discounted to reflect the reduced flood risk resulting from the community actions meeting the three goals of the CRS; reduce flood losses, facilitate accurate insurance rating, and promote the awareness of flood insurance.
The Village of Glenview is currently in the process of providing FEMA with the proper material and information that they will need in order to be awarded part of the Community Rating System incentives. They are using GIS to provide them with certain information requested by FEMA and this information is, a list of all publicly-owned, open, dedicated properties in the SFHA (Special Flood Hazard Area), provide calculations of the total acreage of SFHA and acreage of open space within the SFHA (subtract out all impervious surface), and provide a map clearly identifying all open space properties verifying they are in the SFHA. If it were not for GIS then this information would have probably been obtained through a consultant and cost the Village more time and money then necessarily needed.
Editing data is a traditional task of the GIS Office. However due to heavy project loads the GIS Office can not always keep up with the volume of utility edits. Additionally updates are only published every quarter, so it can take up to three months before employees see updates in the GIS data. This often leads to frustration as employees know there are issues with the data but do not immediately see updates.
Therefore the City decided to purchase a version of ESRI ArcEditor. This software provides the ability to edit the attributes and location of features. It allows the editing of features within a geometric network and thus ensuring that no network errors are created during editing. Two experienced with ESRI ArcView users were trained to edit in ArcEditor.
The trained employees are just beginning to review and edit data. Their first impressions were positive as they were able to correct some major issues they had known about for years. They also plan to add institutional knowledge such as pipe joint types along with other attributes currently not collected by GIS. The GIS Office will continue to update data with records drawing, as well as reviewing the work completed by the Public Works Employees.
The biggest advantage of providing editing capabilities to the Public Works Employees is that edits can be made immediately. It is also quicker as employees can update information directly and skip the step of recording it a field note atlas. This editing ability is expected to be a great cost saver for the community, while greatly improving the accuracy and completeness of the utility data.
The Senior Connector is a bus route which provides free bus transportation for Senior Citizens. The route is funded by the city and includes stops at senior residential facilities, retail, and recreational stops. It is an important resource for ensuring the mobility of senior citizens.
Because the City of Highland Park provides all the funding for the Senior Connector, they wanted to evaluate the annual number of riders for each Senior Connector stop to determine if some of the stops should be drooped. One item of interest was adjusting the routes and stops in the Central Business District.
The GIS office was contacted to create two maps. The first map showed the location of each stop with the number of riders. It also showed the direction of the connector traveled from each stop. The map was useful for evaluating the location of each stop and the number of annual riders at each stop. The second map showed the routes through the Central Business District and was useful for evaluating the location of the routes to determine if all the important places were served by the Senior Connector.
By using maps created with GIS, the city had a strong visual tool for evaluating the current status of rider-ship of the Senior Connector. It allowed them to evaluate proposed changes to the Senior Connector route based where seniors were most likely to use the service.
The Senior Connector is a bus route which provides free bus transportation for Senior Citizens. The route is funded by the city and included stops at senior residential facilities, retail, and recreational stops. It is an important resource for ensuring the mobility of senior citizens.
Because the City of Highland Park provides all the funding for the Senior Connector, they wanted to evaluate the annual number of riders for each Senior Connector stop to determine if some of the stops should be drooped. One item of interest was adjusting the routes and stops in the Central Business District.
The GIS office was contacted to create two maps. The first map showed the location of each stop with the number of riders. It also showed the direction of the connector traveled from each stop. The map was useful for evaluating the location of each stop and the number of annual riders at each stop. The second map showed the routes through the Central Business District and was useful for evaluating the location of the routes to determine if all the important places were served by the Senior Connector.
By using maps created with GIS, the city had a strong visual tool for evaluating the current status of rider-ship of the Senior Connector. It allowed them to evaluate proposed changes to the Senior Connector route based where seniors were most likely to use the service.