Abstract Manager

The British Columbia Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure retained HDR to explore the economic value of transportation by leveraging best practices in data sharing, platform digitization, and economic analysis. To establish an understanding of existing conditions and baseline economic impact of the transportation network, HDR proposed to develop an online GIS dashboard instead of a traditional report. Leveraging digital delivery would enable cross-modal analysis and support improved data visibility to the province and its partners (businesses, communities, First Nations), enabling improved decision making by all.

HDR created a central data repository and developed a comprehensive Dashboard to display the data, focusing on making the data accessible and easy to interpret. The Dashboard included infrastructure and use data for a wide range of transportation modes. Complementary data sets including land use, economic, businesses, and demography data were added to provide further context, and when directly integrated into the analyses, provide considerable additional value to inform integrated decision making.

As the Dashboard came together, the project team developed “use cases” to further mine the data, one of which was a bridge re-routing tool. The tool enables users to understand base travel times across bridges, and then see what the shortest alternative route would be if the bridge were unavailable. The results can be viewed for an individual bridge or for all 2,932 provincial-owned bridges at once. The bridges are symbolized based on their detour length, enabling the viewer to understand the most critical bridges and corridors at a glance, and then dive deeper into individual bridge data as required (age, material, etc.).

The Dashboard, data, and use cases are likely to be instrumental in informing the Province’s project prioritization, transportation network development, and resiliency planning going forward. When publicly available, they are expected to be valuable to any entity that plans, maintains or relies on the transportation system, such as highway planners, maintenance contractors, businesses, trucking companies, shippers, First Nations, and communities.

The presentation will provide an overview of Dashboard, the use cases, and exploration of the value that digital delivery can provide to strategic, provincial-level economic analysis and transportation planning. It will showcase the benefits of a digital approach to infrastructure inventories and economic analysis, and will provide information on how organizations can leverage their digital data to make better decisions.