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See You in Sacramento - Continued...
For us to continue making the world a better place through our profession, we need leaders. Members willing to share their energy and time toward advancing our profession. We need people like you moving our ITE District 6 goals to new levels in the future - in career development, student engagement, technical excellence, promoting our profession and establishing a solid framework for networking. I want to encourage you to vote for your section, chapter, district and international leaders. We have great candidates in all areas and a small investment can generate substantial reward if we work together toward our goals. Please consider participating in ITE leadership this year – contact me if you have questions about roles and opportunities.
A great place to contact me will be in Sacramento June 20 – 23 for our District 6 Annual Meeting. You will experience the largest technical program in our history and a great opportunity to share information, opinions, views and ideas in a family friendly environment that celebrates our profession.
One vision of mine, the student chapter data collection fund, has blossomed to greater levels than I imagined. Twelve excellent proposals from nine student chapters were received. The selected student chapters and topics were:
- University of California, Davis – Bicycle Clearance Times at Signalized Intersections
- University of Utah – I-15 New HOV Lanes Vehicle and Occupancy Data
- Montana State University – Performance of Speed Trailers in Vehicle Speed Reduction
- Boise State University – Signalized Intersection Saturation Flow Rate Surveys
- Portland State University – Survey of Prior Mode of Travel for New LRT Line Patrons
Thank you to Karen Aspelin, Alyssa Reynolds and Jennifer Rosales for helping with the selection process. I will be reporting on the findings in Sacramento and we will be placing this data on the Tech Board of the www.westernite.org web site. Please join me in Sacramento for a great technical meeting and find out what the data collection fund has produced. See you there.
MUTCD/Driver Feedback Sign Update
Over the past year I have been highlighting use of the new driver feedback sign. In the last issue I included text from 2003 MUTCD regarding the design of the sign. Since that message, I sought additional clarification regarding specifics not included in MUTCD regarding the sign design. For those that have not utilized the web version of the MUTCD (found at http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/HTM/2003/html-index.htm as I noted in the January issue of WesternITE), it is a must see – the text is in html (not just .pdf) and is extremely easy to use from your desktop – I don’t even use the book version any more (sorry ITE).
Beyond that there is a feature called Peer-to-Peer. I decided to use it to ask a question  regarding the driver feedback sign and found this service even better that the web site. I called 1-888-700-7337 (you can email too at P2P@fhwa.dot.gov - details and ability to comment on the web can be found in the Technical Assistance Section). I spoke with Fred Ranck of FHWA and I asked him specifically what color the bordering fixed message text of the driver feedback sign should be (since I had seen European versions with black letters on yellow). He clarified for me that it should be a rectangular regulatory sign with white background and black lettering. The changeable portion of the sign is the only part that should be yellow on black.
We talked about several other things, such as having Table 2B-1 include graphics of each sign with links that if you click on the sign, the detail sheet of the sign would appear with an enlarged graphic, colors, dimensions and use details. We also talked about organizing the peer-to-peer Discussion Area comments list by related section number in MUTCD, as well as several other MUTCD war stories. These will have to wait for another day but for now kudos to FHWA for this service-oriented accomplishment to the profession.
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