How GIS Supports Local Technical Assistance

The United States transportation network serves over 124 million households, ensuring access to essential goods and services. It supports the movement of people, products, and resources across the nation, shaping communities and supporting the economy in countless ways.

Within this system, Local Technical Assistance Programs (LTAPs) serve as a vital link that brings innovations and technical expertise to communities, both big and small, across the country. These programs ensure that no community is left behind in the push for safer, more accessible transportation infrastructure. In this blog, we dive into the transformative role LTAPs play and explore how AI-powered geospatial data can revolutionize transportation planning efforts and drive innovation.

Understanding Local Technical Assistance Programs

Agencies such as State Departments of Transportation (DOTs) and Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) play a vital role in maintaining and enhancing transportation infrastructure, ensuring networks across the US remain safe, efficient, and accessible to all.

Given the scale of the nation's transportation networks, managing this vast infrastructure requires a coordinated effort at various levels of government. For example, there are over 8 million miles of public roads across the US, but how they are managed varies. DOTs are primarily responsible for overseeing state-owned roads, including highways and interstates, ensuring that these critical arteries are maintained, repaired, and upgraded to remain safe and efficient. At the local level, MPOs along with counties and cities, take charge of managing regional roads, focusing on improving safety, alleviating congestion, and enhancing overall road quality to support the needs of communities. In a country as vast and diverse as the US, where transportation needs can vary dramatically from one region to another, information sharing among agencies plays a key role in optimizing transportation safety and maintaining nationwide efficiency.

Recognizing the growing need for knowledge-sharing among transportation agencies, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) established the Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) in 1982. The program was created to provide local transportation departments, particularly those in smaller communities, with access to the latest innovations, technical expertise, and best practices needed to effectively maintain and enhance their roadways and transportation systems. Today, LTAP operates through a network of 51 centers—one in each state, as well as in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands—offering technical training, facilitating the transfer of new technologies, and supporting local agencies in achieving transportation goals. Usually located within a State DOT or a university, LTA Centers collaborate with states to assess local needs, offer technical expertise, and advance statewide transportation objectives, including safety, infrastructure upkeep, and best practices. They serve as a vital link between the DOT and local governments, ensuring that local agencies have the necessary knowledge, resources, and support to manage their transportation systems effectively.

AI-powered data for local technical assistance 

As the world evolves, our transportation networks do too. Transportation infrastructure can deteriorate over time due to factors like aging materials, heavy usage, and insufficient maintenance. Roads are repaved, sidewalks are built, and other key infrastructure is continually updated to meet the changing needs of communities. At the same time, transportation agencies are tasked with ambitious highway safety, active transportation, and air quality mitigation plans. To effectively support these initiatives, comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date data is essential. However, maintaining transportation asset databases across an entire state can be a complex and daunting task in our dynamically changing world.

For many transportation agencies, technological and financial constraints can make it difficult to not only create these layers but also maintain them over time, which limits the usability of this data to support key safety functions. Since open datasets are often outdated, incomplete, or fragmented, it can be hard to capture the true scope of transportation networks. To gather accurate geospatial data, GIS experts may manually digitize features from imagery. While this method may work for small datasets, attempting to scale it to cover thousands of miles of roads across entire states quickly becomes a tedious, time-consuming, and costly process.

Ecopia AI (Ecopia) offers a powerful solution. By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI), Ecopia delivers unprecedented clarity into transportation infrastructure, mapping every road, driveway, and sidewalk with pinpoint accuracy.

Enhancing efficiency for DOTs and local agencies

Ecopia’s AI-powered mapping systems use high-resolution imagery to extract detailed vector layers for various transportation infrastructure features including roads, traffic lanes, crosswalks, sidewalks, bike lanes, turning lanes, street trees, intersections, medians, and more. Trained on tens of millions of square miles of imagery, Ecopia’s systems deliver data with the same level of precision as a dedicated GIS professional but in a fraction of the time. This allows GIS professionals to spend more time on analysis and decision-making, rather than being bogged down by tedious manual digitization tasks. 

Ecopia’s data enables DOTs to efficiently manage statewide databases with local assets, and share this information with local agencies. This ensures access to accurate infrastructure data for informed decision-making, at a cost 80% less than manual digitization. With Ecopia’s time and cost efficiencies, extracting and maintaining detailed transportation data across an entire state becomes both feasible and sustainable. This not only reduces the workload for state and local employees but also provides the high-precision data needed to support the US Department of Transportation’s (USDOT's) safety, sustainability, and equity goals.

Empowering the Illinois DOT with high-precision data 

An example of these efficiencies is demonstrated through Ecopia’s partnership with the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT). In 2022, Ecopia collaborated with IDOT to create high-definition mapping data across an area of 12,000+ square miles. This included 26 land cover and advanced transportation features that are accessible for hundreds of local agencies operating in the state, including the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP). This high-precision data supports a variety of applications across the state, including long-range transportation planning, Vision Zero initiatives, Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance, and more.

Aligning local plans with USDOT objectives and guidelines

Ecopia’s high-precision data provides state DOTs and local agencies with the most comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date transportation insights available, offering a clear and detailed view of the entire network. This data enables the maintenance of Model Inventory of Roadway Elements (MIRE 2.0) without placing an undue burden on internal teams or local agencies. Covering everything from roads to bike and pedestrian infrastructure, Ecopia’s data supports both statewide and local initiatives, supporting optimal investment decision-making.

Currently, many local agencies struggle with limited or misaligned data that does not meet state standards. As a result, they must invest significant time and resources collecting, aggregating, and converting local data into formats that comply with state datasets—a process that’s both time-consuming and costly. Ecopia’s data can save local agencies time and reduce costs. Working from the same source of truth ensures that everyone–from state DOTs to local agencies– are aligned and operating with consistent, reliable data. This increases cohesion, streamlines decision-making, and enhances overall efficiency. It also supports data-driven planning, reduces administrative burdens, and enables local agencies to focus on strategic initiatives rather than data management.

Creating more equitable funding distributions 

States are responsible for determining how to distribute funding in a way that supports the entire transportation system. They must prioritize investments in various areas, ensuring that resources are allocated effectively to address the most pressing needs across highways, local roads, transit systems, and other transportation infrastructure. This requires careful evaluation. With Ecopia’s AI-powered data, states can now generate the high-precision transportation data they need in just weeks. This robust data provides a clear, statewide overview that can guide both planning and funding decisions.

At the same time, LTAP coordinators are responsible for justifying funding distributions across districts and their counties and cities. Ecopia's AI-powered data can make this process clearer and more transparent, providing strong support in justifying funding distributions with data-driven insights. Creating and sharing this data on behalf of local areas can help explain how funding decisions are made and ensure those distributions are based on need, which is the most equitable approach. For instance, when determining funding for bike and pedestrian assets, Ecopia’s advanced transportation features can be combined with traffic, crash, and census data to provide a comprehensive and compelling view of safety throughout the network. This holistic approach enables more informed, targeted decisions, ensuring that funds are allocated where they can have the greatest impact on improving safety and infrastructure, which ultimately brings DOTs closer to achieving their Vision Zero goals.

Analyzing transportation safety in Chicago with Ecopia’s data

To illustrate the power of Ecopia’s data, the image below illustrates an analysis conducted in Chicago using a combination of crash data, US Census Bureau demographic information, and Ecopia's advanced transportation features. This analysis, which uncovered critical safety insights, emphasizes the importance of understanding the design of existing roads and surrounding infrastructure in selecting effective safety countermeasures. By identifying high-risk areas, this data can help prioritize investment decisions where they are most needed to improve safety and reduce accidents. You can explore the full details of this study here.

Supporting federal reporting with local data

When it comes to federal reporting, AI-powered data from Ecopia can also help support state DOTs in their reporting efforts to the USDOT to ensure that funding matches local needs. Whether it's informing State Safety Plans or updating to the latest MIRE standards, reliable and precise data is essential for federal reporting requirements.  Ecopia’s high-precision transportation reduces the time and effort required to compile and report data. With comprehensive, up-to-date insights into infrastructure, state and local agencies can confidently demonstrate how funding is being used to address specific transportation challenges. This not only ensures compliance with federal mandates but also strengthens the transparency and accountability of transportation investments, helping agencies advocate for the resources needed to improve safety, infrastructure, and overall mobility.

A trusted partner for transportation mapping data 

With over a decade of experience partnering with transportation authorities worldwide, Ecopia specializes in creating comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date maps that empower strategic decision-making. Our data provides a reliable digital source of truth for current transportation networks, unlocking new opportunities for analysis.

No matter your transportation planning goals, Ecopia can scale your data creation needs, allowing you to focus on what truly matters: analyzing insights and driving positive change. To learn more, get in touch with our team today.