***** METADATA FOR NEWROADS ***** SUMMARY Location of planned new road construction and road widenings in Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. PURPOSE The purpose was to create a GIS data set representing future road construction in the EPA MAIA study region. The latest data came from planning departments during 1999. Two types of construction were considered: the first are completely new roads being built on new easements and the second are road widenings which include the addition of one or more traffic lanes. Both are for projects greater than one quarter mile in length and in rural areas. COVERAGE TYPE Arc/Info lines COORDINATE SYSTEM Projection ALBERS Units METERS Spheroid GRS1980 Parameters: 1st standard parallel 29 30 0.000 2nd standard parallel 45 30 0.000 central meridian -96 0 0.000 latitude of projection's origin 23 0 0.000 false easting (meters) 0.00000 false northing (meters) 0.00000 METHODS - SOURCING For the pertinent states an intensive search for road building plans was undertaken. Agencies at national, state, local levels were explored and contacted. Most involved delving into publicly available data located on their WWW pages. Others required phone calls and e-mails to gather or verify information. Success ratios on returns of messages and obtaining more information, beyond what web sites contained, was low. There seems to be a certain amount of bureaucracy with all of the agencies and generally was never clear, even to them, who has access to what information. Unfortunately, no digital GIS information was able to be obtained and likely did not exist. Planning departments and GIS departments seem not to be linked. The fairly consistent from state to state document known as the "Transportation Improvement Program" (TIP) was the most valuable source for road planning. It is mandated from the National DOT if a state expects to receive any transportation infrastructure funding. Some state or local planning district's documents were more detailed than others. A summary of the major road planning resources used per state follows: Delaware State Capital TIP, 1998-2003 Wilmington Area Planning Council, 2025 Metropolitan Transportation Plan (draft) Maryland State Consolidated Transportation Program (CTP), 1999-2004 Pennsylvania 12 Year Transportation Program, 1999 Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission TIP, 1998-2002 Virginia Commonwealth Transportation Board Fiscal Year 1997-98 Six Year Improvement Plan West Virginia Statewide Transportation Policy Plan, 1995-2014 In addition, the WWW was used extensively to find information about local projects that had limited detail in the region wide TIP plans. Other information, usually in the form or map locations or time lines, came from sources like DOT construction project updates, county or municipal governments, political organization for or against a project, or the contractor. The bigger projects often had their own pages established by a local planning committee. This web based information was found using common search engines like Alta Vista, Yahoo, and Infoseek. Searches were based on keywords related to the particular project. An example search might include "bypass, route 219, wyoming county, construction." METHODS - LOCATING Since not all projects were given with a map, the exact location was found from the project description using a variety of digital and paper maps. Currently held GIS coverages did not usually give enough detail regarding the various names a particular road could be called and were often not up to date. Hardcopy statewide maps were obtained for each state through their DOT/tourism department and provided general reference. For Pennsylvania, highly detailed county level maps were available online in .pdf format. ESRI's "TravelMap" CD-ROM was used as a local search engine system to speed the locating of difficult to find roads. For the most hard find areas, common web based mapping programs were employed. It was found that Microsoft's Expedia Maps was the best of the lot because it allowed for the most limited input queries and gave the most possible returns. For example, it could show possible locations based only on a roadway and statename. Expedia Maps' database also contains state road numbers which others, such as MapQuest, Maps on Us, and MapBlast, lack. METHODS - DIGITIZING In the digitizing of new roads the coverage MAIA-HWY97 was used as a template. This coverage is a subset of the National Highway Planning Network from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. It shows the location of interstate and U.S. highways at a 1:100,000 scale with a maximum of 80 m positional error. Because there are several versions of the MAIA boundary, some or which extend in area out somewhat further, conservative estimates to include roadways on or across the boundary were used. Urban roadway projects were not updated. The US Census Bureau 1990 urban areas coverage was used to delineate those regions. Roadway projects that crossed an urban area boundary were included in entirety. Those that fell completely within an urban area were not included. Depending on a future user's needs one may find it appropriate to clip off those roadways that extent beyond the MAIA boundary or cross into urban regions. If the roadway being updated was found in the national coverage, that arc was simply copied and put into the new file and its attributes updated appropriately. If a new roadway was being built it was added by digitizing on screen using detailed USGS 1:100,000 DLG roads in the screen background for reference. For each road update, three attributes were assigned. The updating was done on a state by state basis and then all adjoined into a single coverage as a final step. ATTRIBUTES PROJID Project ID. A unique code given to the project from the particular planning department. This can be used to reference the project back to the state or local government's documents. It is in character format, no greater than 10 in length. PLAN Type of construction given by an integer. 1 = New roadway 2 = Addition of lanes to roadway YEAR Year of expected project completion. For near future projects one can expect this number to be fairly accurate. For longer term projects it is more of a guide. Often far ranging plans are not detailed in time. In those cases they are given with the earliest time it would be completed followed by a "+" character. For example, a project that would finish no earlier than the year 2005 would be given as "2005+". Some project are just being suggested or may only have suitability studies in progress. Those case are given as "Study." The format is in characters, no greater than 5 in length. ACCURACY Locational accuracy of the project is limited by the amount of detail from the TIP documents. Often even they don't know the final location of a planned roadway. In the best case scenario the accuracy can be expected to be within 80 m, same as that of the DLG. In general most projects would be expected to be within that 80 m tolerance, especially the widening ones that follow existing roadways. In the worst case a roadway might be off by as much as a couple of kilometers when the new road projects have yet to be finalized and are subject to change. This is especially true for distant in the future plans. DATE COMPLETED 30 September 1999 CONTACT David Johnson Lockheed Martin Technology Services RTP, NC (919) 541-2878 johnson.david@epa.gov