Introducing the Transport Disruption Assessment tool
We’ve made it even easier for Project Managers to see if their projects are impacting the transport network, and for RCAs to get a heads-up on potentially disruptive projects in their jurisdiction. Spearheaded by Auckland Transport (AT), the idea is that both the Road Controlling Authority (RCA) and Project Managers can quickly see what projects are intersecting (and therefore potentially impacting) a transport layer or service that the RCA deems as strategic or important.
There’s two parts to this tool:
- The TDA button on projects and stages.
This is a new icon next to the clashes and opportunities indicator on a project. The TDA button will show you which transport layers your project is intersecting with. We currently only have layers/services loaded in for the Auckland Region, and the layers/services have been specified by the RCA (Auckland Transport) as to what they deem important to their network. The layers we have loaded in so far are:
i. Public Bus routes and bus stops
ii. School Bus routes and bus stops
iii. Cycle routes
iv. Arterial roads
v. Transit lanes
vi. Overdimension routes
vii. Overweight routes
viii. HPMV detour routes
Over time we will enhance this functionality, so that not only will the TDA assessment tell you what layer your project intersects with, it’ll tell you useful information about that layer – such as the bus route you’re impacting, or which level of arterial road you’re on. This will be helpful in mitigating project risk and could assist with project preapprovals. We will also be loading in more layers as time goes on.
If your project TDA says ‘No data’, that means that there’s no layers that your project will be intersecting with within 1km of your project. It also might mean that there’s no data loaded in for your RCA region yet.
If your project TDA says ‘0’, that means that your project boundary doesn’t intersect with any transport layers directly, but there are transport layers within 1km of your project, so depending on how you’ve drawn your project boundary, you may want to turn on the contextual layers tab and check for any intersection.
2. The Transport Disruption Assessment Report (coming soon!)
This is a new report that will soon be available in your Dashboard. Primarily aimed at users who work in the network coordination space, it enables you to search for projects by address or area and generates a list of projects which intersect with the specified Transport Disruption layers (see above). Developed in conjunction with Auckland Transport, the Works Coordination team at AT will be using this report to help analyse the risk of projects on their network, and we envisage it being useful to anyone in the works coordination/network management space beyond the Auckland region when we have more datasets loaded.
The report will have the same functionality as a watchlist – it’ll self-populate with projects that are published to the FWV which match the criteria you’ve set in the report. You’ll be able to mark projects as ‘read’ and ‘unread’ in the report, and you’ll be able to turn on email notifications.
Over time this report will be enhanced, and we’ll also add additional reporting – so users will be able to run reports on which projects intersect with specific layers rather than a pre-set group of layers, such as bus routes only, or cultural sites, or notable trees.
I want this functionality in my RCA – how do I get it?
Great, thanks for showing interest! There’s a bit of work that needs to be done in the background to get this working for other jurisdictions – but if you’re keen to get rolling, send us an email at naomi@openplan.co.nz. We’ll need to ingest the datasets that you want to include in the Transport Disruption Assessment so they’ll need to be in a spatial and shareable format such as a REST service.
Additional feature enhancements worth talking about
We’ve also been working on other fixes, enhancements and functionality – so here’s a summary of what’s changed.
- For the users who have edit access and input projects manually, or add project boundaries within the FWV, you may have noticed some workflow changes related to adding and editing projects and stages.
We have also:
- Moved clashes and opportunities to their own panel, instead of having them at the bottom of the project summary page
- Added instructions to the project boundary drawing panel
- Given transport impacts their own panel rather than them being relatively hidden on the project boundary page.
- Created a new user type – ‘project editor’. This permission type removes the ability to add a project and edit project details, but retains the ability to add and edit project boundaries and transport impacts. This is a useful user type for organisations who have a system of record which feeds the FWV data, but don’t have the ability to spatialise their data and therefore use the FWV to add project boundaries to their project data sets.
- Added additional fields to the filter on My Organisation’s Projects page, so you can now filter projects by whether it has stages, or transport impacts.