Background

The Ohio Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) Center produces its Roadside Safety Field Guide as a quick reference for Ohio's Department of Transportation (ODOT) and Local Public Agency construction and maintenance staff and contractors working in the field on road safety infrastructure.

While the field guide is handy and useful out in the field, it is costly to print and update. To make the guide more accessible and less expensive to produce, Ohio LTAP developed a mobile application for construction and maintenance staff to access the guide via existing handheld electronic devices, such as their smart phones.

A New Mobile App

The Roadside Safety Field Guide app summarizes guidelines established in the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Roadside Design Guide for installing and maintaining roadside safety hardware. This mobile job aid includes basic principles, descriptions and images of roadside safety hardware, design considerations, and maintenance information.

Ohio transportation agencies at all levels can use the application for all aspects of safety infrastructure maintenance and construction. For instance, if a guardrail is damaged, crews sent to install a new guardrail can refer to guidelines detailed in the app. Staff at the FHWA division office also use the app during inspections and site reviews. Push notifications automatically notify users about updates to the guide and make it easy for users to download the newest version.

Developing the App

The content for the application—the safety guide itself—was already established. That gave Ohio LTAP a leg up and allowed its developer to start with user-interface considerations. Ohio LTAP staff and the developer worked on creating a document structure that made sense for a mobile app, to make it intuitive for users to navigate from main menus to submenus and quickly find needed information.

Key Challenges

While the coding work for the app was fairly simple, finding someone who could do the coding came down to innovative hiring. The LTAP center decided to hire a college intern with coding experience to create the app. Ohio LTAP decided to move forward with the intern as the developer instead of finding a more costly outside firm to create and update the app. Ohio LTAP has found in conversations with other LTAP and ODOT programs interested in developing their own field guide applications that finding cost-effective app development is an ongoing challenge. That is why the Ohio LTAP Center decided to seek out a college intern with the right background and then provide the intern a resume-enhancing opportunity to create the mobile app. This model worked well for Ohio LTAP and they plan to continue it as future apps are developed.

User Feedback

Feedback has been universally positive—Ohio LTAP has not received any requests to bring back the printed guidebooks. Staff in the field have real-time information at their fingertips to make the right decisions to positively impact the safety of the traveling public.

Benefits

Ohio LTAP and ODOT have seen the following benefits from developing its field guide mobile application:

• Significant savings in printing costs.
• Can push out changes to the guide more easily.
• Easier to make users aware of changes.

Upcoming Apps

Because the roadside safety guide application makes updating the guide faster and cheaper than printing new hard copies, Ohio LTAP is pursuing several other new mobile applications as well. Next up is a sign installation app with guidelines for typical sign installations on local roads. Then there will be a safety countermeasures app, so staff in the field who encounter a possible roadway safety issue or are conducting a Road Safety Audit will be able to access and review potential countermeasures on their phones.

Ohio LTAP is also developing small marketing cards with quick-read (QR) codes to pass out at conferences and other events to guide potential users to the app download sites. Finally, Ohio LTAP recently purchased 40 tablets to offer an electronic version of the guide during trainings—in the long run, it is expected the tablets will dramatically reduce the cost of printing guides for use in the classroom setting.

Contact

Victoria Beale
Ohio LTAP Center Director
Ohio Department of Transportation
614-466-3129
Victoria.Beale@dot.ohio.gov