Microsoft's Virtual Earth continues its penetration of US Department of Transportation agencies, now with Kansas DOT (KDOT) for its public facing 511 application.

Kansas lies at the heart of the nation and is the hub for a significant amount of cross-country travel. The Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT) cares for more than 9,500 miles of highway and more than 26.5 million vehicle miles are traveled each day on the state’s highway system. Two interstates run through the state. Interstate 70 is a major corridor linking the eastern U.S. with Colorado and Interstate 35 links the southern U.S. with Kansas City, Iowa, and Minnesota. Travelers on these and other routes want to know about the road conditions so they can make good travel decisions. KDOT provides online road condition information for its travelers using Microsoft Virtual Earth as the mapping platform. KDOT overlays highway information such as planned and active work zones, road closings, and winter road conditions onto the Virtual Earth map.

Before choosing Virtual Earth, KDOT served its own base map in addition to the road condition information. With Virtual Earth as the base map, road condition information loads more quickly and the burden on KDOT’s servers is much less during times of heavy use. KDOT also selected Virtual Earth because it is compatible with a variety of browsers. The result for the user is a more responsive and dependable tool to help them make their driving decisions.

KDOT’s road condition map can be viewed here. The site is pretty easily navigated, typical of most Virtual Earth based web portals.

Looking at the screenshot below, you can see that we have data layers in the left column that can be turned on (and off) to visualize road conditions and road work activities. These correspond to related datapoints on the map that you can mouseover for a text label that describes what the datapoint is. Unfortunately for this example, there does not appear to be any weather reported by road sensors for us to look at, so I mouseover what is reported as road reconstruction.

When I click on that text label, a new window is opened that provides me detailed information about the road reconstruction (pictured below).

A nice feature that I am not sure that I have seen with other 511 sites is that the KDOT site shows you the stretch of road that is affected by particular road conditions. For example, in the screenshot below you can see that Vine Street is undergoing shoulder work that extends from just outside of Hays and down to Turkville. Travelers know to avoid that stretch of road after viewing the site. (Note I have switched over to aerial view in the application.)

At the top of the site are additional menu items (shown in screenshot below) for additional information in tabular format as well as a mobile option to get road condition data from your cell devices. I like that this option requires the user to agree to a disclaimer that instructs not to use the 511 Mobile website "while engaged in operating a vehicle."  Very nice!

The one feature that I feel is not as slick as it could be is "Road Cameras." To view web cam shots of major roads, you click on the Road Cameras menu item which displays a page from which you can select different web cam views. I would like to see the ability to layer these datapoints on the map just as is possible with the Roadwork Activities and Road Weather Conditions.

Having said that, I have to give a big thumbs up to the folks at KDOT for this nicely designed 511 application and for selecting Virtual Earth as the mapping platform to deliver a more intuitive, easy to use 511 web site for citizens traveling across the Sunflower State. Be sure to check it out!

-=Virtual Jerry