The Vermont Transportation Agency is the first State Department of Transportation (DOT) in the U.S. to bring their photo logs to Mapillary. 5 million images collected over 5 years are now easy to integrate into the agency’s workflows, and also available to the public as open data.

In 2016, I met Jonathan Croft from the Vermont Transportation Agency (VTrans) Mapping Section at the Esri User Conference. One long procurement process and a couple of hard drives later, VTrans’ right-of-way and pavement imagery is now available on Mapillary under the CC-BY-SA license and to OpenStreetMap.

VTrans right-of-way imagery on mapillary.com

The VTrans photo log is a significant contribution: 5 million images (5 years’ worth!) across 15,000 miles of state road. It’s also our first from a U.S. Department of Transportation. Our work here builds on the experience from working with photo logs from the City of Amsterdam, the Lithuanian Road Authority, and municipalities all over the world.

In addition to supporting VTrans’ commitment to open data, over the next few years we hope to demonstrate our value in providing a delightful viewing experience, integration into their key workflows (e.g. traffic sign inspection, pavement maintenance), and automated feature extraction for surveys or inventory.

Viewing VTrans imagery in ArcGIS Pro

We were happy to present our work at this year’s GIS-T, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials national symposium for sharing experiences in the field. What we saw at the conference was more validation for the Mapillary approach:

• Easy integration with Esri’s Road and Highways Linear Referencing System (LRS)

• Growing interest in open data and OpenStreetMap

• Disenchantment with the restrictions on and limitations of Google Street View

• A fun and collaborative ecosystem of GIS professionals passionate about improving transportation services

Eric Abrams, Iowa DOT Geospatial Manager, and Mark McCart, HNTB GIS Systems Architect, dive into the Matrix of GIS tools

Learn more about our work with VTrans in this case study. We look forward to working with more transportation agencies in 2018.

/Janine