City of Oakland Infrastructure Evalutation

Project Info
Location - Oakland, CA - United States Amount of Data - 60-100 miles Application - Curb Ramps and Parking Meters Products - earthmine Viewer, earthmine for ArcGIS Delivery Method - earthmine Cloud

The City of Oakland, a city of approximately 390,000 located in California, recently implemented a complete earthmine solution in order to rapidly populate and update their GIS data for a number of asset types and to share this data across multiple departments within the city. Within the Department of Public works, the earthmine solution was used for an evaluation of curb ramp compliance with the Americans with Disbilities Act of 1990 (ADA). In addition, a survey of parking meters was also conducted. These two asset types are representative of typical infrastructure in the City of Oakland that require continuous evaluation, and typically result in significant costs to collect and manage using traditional survey and inspection methods. ADA Evaluation Ensuring that sidewalks and pedestrian routes are ADA compliant is an important and ongoing issue for all Public Works Departments throughout the United States. Numerous costly field inspections have traditionally made identification of non-compliant conditions cost prohibitive. This often results in insufficient documentation and allows potential obstructions to be left in disrepair. The earthmine solution is able to mitigate those costs by eliminating unnecessary field inspections, and by moving the evaluation process into the office. Once collected with the MARS system, the first step was to identify any potential non-compliant candidates, through visual inspection using the earthmine for ArcGIS add-in. The purpose of this step was to identify the presence of detectable warnings, severe cracking, lifted pavement, or any other obvious obstructions. Any ramps found to be non-compliant based on this criteria would then be flagged for further inspection. The next step was then to take measurements in the earthmine view, in order to evaluate features such as, ramp dimensions, flare dimensions, rough slope, vertical clearances, and any abrupt changes in grade. At this point it could be determined if a ramp required physical inspection by a technician. By integrating the earthmine solution into their workflow, individuals are dispatched to the field on an as needed basis. The end result is increased efficiency and cost savings at every level, collection, inspection, and time spent in the field.

Parking Meters Using the same data set, the citys Financial Department was also able to collect detailed information on their parking meters. Information such as meter hours, location, condition, can all be tagged in the earthmine system to ensure this important source of city revenue is kept operating efficiently. Prior to implementing the earthmine solution, meters were tracked using traditional ortho-photography in an ArcGIS Server Editing application. This solution, while workable, presented problems with accuracy and difficulties in identifying meters from aerial imagery. It was decided to collect meter locations using earthmine Viewer, and then tag them more accurately using the earthmine ArcGIS Add-in. This allowed staff to get a clean capture, snap to other GIS features using native ArcGIS tools, and rely on editing templates in ArcGIS 10 to streamline the editing time and process. In order to preserve internal accuracy in GIS, new parking meters were snapped to existing GIS sidewalk segments (the center-line of the sidewalk digitized from ortho-photos). Parking meter staff is in charge of attributing the MeterID information, notes, and address information to preserve existing conventions. This information was back-filled through an ArcGIS Server application which writes the data to Oaklands centralized GIS database. Conclusions and Opportunities This project demonstrated to the City of Oakland that significant cost savings and increased efficiency could be achieved across multiple departments that deal with GIS and asset management. Rather than relying on numerous and often redundant field surveys and inspections, smaller, more focused teams of individuals in the office were able to work in the earthmine environment using our robust suite of software and platform extensions. This provided them with an end-toend increase in efficiency and reduction of cost from collection, in-office workflow, and back out to the field.

City of Oakland