Scan Tour

2017 WSHEMA Scan Tour

The purpose of the 2017 WSHEMA Winter Maintenance Equipment Domestic Technical Scan Tour was to seek out and observe the progress that other State DOT Fleets are making in advancing and managing winter equipment fleet assets within todays challenging operating theaters of winter highway maintenance.   While the objective of the scan tour was to seek out and observe best practices, the limited number of site visits may not necessarily reflect true best practices across the country, rather the best practices among a limited number of agencies visited within the Midwest and Northeast Regions.  Nonetheless, this scan tour did see a lot of best practices, and will recount on the best of what was seen.

This experience has shown that the “scan” approach is a productive means for encouraging the spread of information and innovative winter maintenance equipment practices. Many of the program participants have noted that the quicker newly emerged ideas are shared; the faster dissemination of many of these ideas can yield benefits to those in other State DOT Fleet Management agencies.

The experience of many attendees may be best summarized by the comments of the Idaho Fleet Delegates “Camaraderie – I was excited about the conversations I had with others in the group. I learned about other DOT operations and took away many great ideas, e.g. – the new lighting procedures for ODOT. It was interesting to hear how others managed programs such as Zonar ® and Cirus ®; their successes and failures. ITD is currently evaluating our equipment lighting, so the opportunity to see current lighting and conspicuity striping was a huge value to us as well as we move forward with revising our standards and implementing new technologies and lights.

Download the Final Report – PDF

 

 

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