abquirarte
commented
4 years ago Caltrans often resorts to twitter updates: https://twitter.com/search?q=caltrans&src=typed_query
Towns often rely on manual signs to reflect road closures:
Open abquirarte opened 4 years ago
abquirarte
commented
4 years ago Caltrans often resorts to twitter updates: https://twitter.com/search?q=caltrans&src=typed_query
Towns often rely on manual signs to reflect road closures:
abquirarte
commented
4 years ago @aaronhans 👇
aaronhans
commented
4 years ago The caltrans road closures page uses a google map: http://quickmap.dot.ca.gov/ so they are paying for a subscription to the google maps service
That site already has a responsive mobile version and a disclaimer at the bottom saying they are working on accessibility: "This application is being updated for digital accessibility and will continue to function while updates are in progress."
@abquirarte it would be great to know how they are doing on their accessibility rewrite efforts, are they just about to release a wonderful new version or are they struggling to get resources on that and would like a little help from us?
abquirarte
commented
4 years ago abquirarte
commented
4 years ago Update from Aaron:
We built a design clickable prototype which would allow users to enter start and end points and see any issues on the route in between those locations.
We hoped this would help users take advantage of Caltrans data which often reports road issues much faster than the mapping applications on our phones.
We built a proof of concept of this using real Caltrans data to make sure we could identify a route and report the issues along it.
Since the initial user feedback was positive and our proof of concept worked we creted 3 new APIs based on Caltrans data. These are documented now on our api site: http://api.alpha.ca.gov/
Direct links to the 3 new APIS:
Lane Closures: https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/9918160/SWLb8Uep?version=latest#46ddcecc-7b6c-4378-bc08-c2b91b542754
Full Road Closures: https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/9918160/SWLb8Uep?version=latest#894f0288-ba6e-4103-8657-6367825d6e0d
CHP Incidents: https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/9918160/SWLb8Uep?version=latest#d5f75d04-de78-44e8-a227-2b3b00a11a5d
We will take advantage of these API endpoints to refine our proof of concept into a prototype which has better performance and UI and continue getting feedback on this approach.
All the code for our front and backend work so far is available on github.
The last two APIs we created are important to meet the user need but we weren't sure we are using the best datasource. The one we could find was the KML file being pulled into quickmaps. Please advise if there is a better way to pull full road closures or chain controls data.
humancenteredhuman
commented
4 years ago From QuickMap, a summary of an accident on 1/28: 
humancenteredhuman
commented
4 years ago 
ChadABratton
commented
4 years ago 
End to end testing passed for road conditions!
As a driver, I need to know the condition of the roads so that I can stay safe (Road Conditions)
Content Type
Calculator (smart answer), Location
Our assumptions, what we want to test/learn
We assume people get what they need from Google Maps. In our initial research we see that there is a data gap between what Google displays vs. road closures. We have seen some cases where people are being routed to go to a direction that has a closed road. We want to test how building an API could help the user experience in providing more accurate data even when users go to their mapping app of choice. This story tests road closures and road conditions. It is not scoped to access data outside the CA borders.
This also tests web accessible map data
Baseline (use screenshots. Github Issues, Links, and date of when test was conducted)
- URL https://roads.dot.ca.gov/
- Speed mobile 88
- Accessibility
(Check for mobile and desktop, slowest speed, include score, use Lighthouse in dev tools to trigger an audit on page, see for walk through https://github.com/cagov/Alpha/issues/68#issuecomment-570694179 )
- Readability (Use http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ and take a screenshot include grade) Grade 11 as of 01092020
Process Status (add links, attachments, DRI, and Github issues)
In connecting with @Aaron Hans on this we think that the road conditions user story could evolve to creating a Progressive Web App out of road alerts. It's like a webpage that seems like a native application so it adds itself to the user's homescreen and can send push notifications. We'd just need to make sure we can work with them and consume the data. This tests several components: