2023 SAG Award Winners

Rhode Island Department of Transportation and Rhode Island Department of Administration

Project Goal

The Rhode Island Department of Transportation (RIDOT) is responsible for maintaining a surface transportation system comprised of more than 1,000 bridges and nearly 3,000 lane miles of roadway. When the Department’s Division of Planning began the process of drafting a new 10-Year Plan in 2019, RIDOT and its partners in the State’s Division of Statewide Planning (RIDSP) faced some significant challenges. RIDOT redesigned the project application and prioritization process to incorporate Geographic Information Systems (GIS), standardizing data and information management right from the start.
This approach has completely digitized the project planning process, consolidating all project information into a single GIS environment. It has transformed RIDOT’s ability to anticipate project conflicts, design more efficient projects, generated cost savings, and improve transparency with a public-facing dashboard.

Business Problem Solved

Rhode Island’s first 10-year plan was completed in 2017 and covered Fiscal Years 2018-2027. Local stakeholders submitted project applications on paper, the projects were evaluated, and Statewide Planning entered them into a local database. Then they were mapped. This resulted in significant issues with data duplication, consistency, and integrity.

Technology Implemented

The process started with off-the-shelf Esri products within the web portal. Assets like bridges are the foundation for all projects, project polygons show physical boundaries, and an information table describes each project. RIDOT built the ‘STIP Bundler’ web app, which allows users to deploy the batch editor to select assets and assign a common STIP ID. That creates the building blocks for projects, which are eventually published in an online dashboard.
The next phase is a custom solution called the Statewide Intake Framework for Transportation (SWIFT). SWIFT will support processing applications for new projects, scoring, evaluating and prioritizing applications, and combining selected projects into “bundles” to achieve economies of scale and publish a finished product for public review.

Development Team Biography

Kenneth White, Ph.D. - Assistant Director for Administrative Services, RIDOT
Stephen Kut - Data Analyst III, RIDOT
William Lincourt - Data Analyst III, RIDOT
Steven Sawyer - Data Analyst I, RIDOT
Vincent Flood - Data Analyst II, RIDSP
Christina Delage-Baza - Data Analyst I, RIDSP