Seattle Area Incident Avoidance

A mobile-friendly Website for general population incident avoidance

This is a UW cross-disciplinary Capstone project sponsored by Mobility Innovation Center, Challenge Seattle, WSDOT, King County Metro, and Sound Transit.

When traffic incidents occur in the Greater Seattle area, our sponsors relay important information through social media, traditional media, electronic roadway signs, and low-power radio stations along with some rare usage of mobile alert systems such as AlertSeattle. While these methods reach a broad group of road users, they do not provide adequate real-time transit recommendations and updates.
They are also not able to reach every consumer with specific information about incidents and the best course of action to take. Our sponsors are seeking recommendations for innovative solutions for wide-reaching notification of traffic incidents and solutions for transportation mode-shifting, departure time recommendations, and route shifts during and shortly after traffic incidents.

Problem Statement

How might we innovate forms of transit incident reporting to the general public and provide accessible, mobile solutions for their needs in a timely manner?

Goals

Our goal is to create an innovative solution that can help the general public navigate through or completely avoid major incidents and related congestion. When a major incident or multiple major incidents occur, our solution will provide a platform where users can be informed of congestion information, departure time shifts, routing recommendations, and support for transportation mode shifting. It is being developed under the assumption of the impending release of the Virtual Command Center, a collective cloud-based information sharing solution between Seattle area transit agencies.

We identified two areas of importance for this project:

1. How user groups can better access or take advantage of current ticketing apps through marketing, partnerships, incentives, etc?
2. Recommend design guidelines for KCM's future mobile ticketing solutions.
   • Promptly informing the general population of incidents which impact their commute
   • Behavior change and modeshift behavior reinforcement

Final Clickable Demo

Demo Webpage(https://annykong.github.io/uwcapstone-modeshift/) | Demo GitHub Repo

Overview

Our solution is an interactive, mobile-friendly website which will be hosted on one of the transit agency’s servers. If an incident happens, the server will be activated and the website link will appear active on the official website of King County Metro (KCM), Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), and Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT), Sound Transit, as well as any other relevant transit agencies. The link would also be sent to Alert Seattle customers as well as those who subscribe to KCM, Sound Transit and WSDOT text alerts directing them to the website.

System Design Overview

Instructions to view on Desktop

• Please use mobile for clickable demo, the Desktop version is only for demonstration of the Desktop design.
• If you want to view the Mobile version on Desktop, please follow instructions below:
  • Make sure you are using Chrome browser
  • Right click on page and select "Inspect"
    • 
  • On top right of the page, click "Toggle device toolbar" to switch to the mobile version
    • 
  • On top left of the page, click on the red the area below, you may select any phone type you want
    • 
  • You are now ready to test the mobile version! p.s. To go back to the Desktop version, just click on the "Toggle device toolbar" again
    • 

Folder Structure

.                       // GitHub Repository contains all files for demo
├── css/                    // containing all css files for website styles.
│   ├── uwcapstone.webflow.css  // customized style file for this project
│   ├── normalize.css           // library style file 
│   └── webflow.css             // library style file made in webflow
│
├── images/                 // containning all logos and images used for this website.
│   └── ...
│
├── js/                     // containing all JavaScript files for dynamically updates the website.
│   ├── modeshift_live_traffic.js   // dynamically fetch and display live traffic data with GoogleMaps JavaScript API
│   ├── modeshift_map.js            // dynamically fetch and display routing recommendation with GoogleMaps ApIs
│   ├── modeshift_update.js         // dynamically mockup scenarios and button/tabs/search... funcationalities
│   ├── webflow.js                  // library js file made in webflow
│   └── vendor/                     // library files
│       ├── bootstrap.js
│       ├── modernizr-2.8.3-respond-1.4.2.min.js
│       ├── npm.js
│       └── jquery-1.11.2.min.js
│
├── index.html                  // main file including basic structure of our web
├── modeshift_live_traffic.html // map with incident demonstration and live traffic for "map section" ("map" tab)
├── modeshift_map.html          // map with routing recommendation for "routing section" (subpage under "plan your route" tab)
├── README.md                   // basic description of the project
└── .gitignore                  // files to ignore when commiting to this repository

Tests

Map Test | Map Test Repo

Instructions to use your GoogleMap API key

• Get your own key here (Get Google API Key).
• And then, in test-map/docs/index.html, substitute replacekey in the code below with the API key you got from the previous step.

  <script  id="google" async defer
           src="https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?key=replacekey&callback=initMap"
  async defer></script>
  

Team website

Team Webpage | Team GitHub Repo
Our Clikcable Demo can be found under the "PROTOTYPE & DEMO" section.

Iterations

• 1st Iteration
• 2nd iteration Code (no server)
• 2nd iteration Code (with server)
• 3rd iteration (Web Design)
• Current version (Combined Design and functionalities)

Our team

• Pari Gabriel (HCDE): Project Manager
  Pari is an organized and detail-oriented student who will be taking lead of the capstone. He will be in charge of coordinating internal team meetings, submitting reports, and keeping track of the team’s progress throughout the duration of the project.

• Chris Angkico (Communications): Marketing Lead
  Chris is an experienced researcher and marketing plan writer that will be assigned the role of marketing lead. He will be in charge of evaluating expert and focus group interview information, as well as any pre-existing research information the group collects, to develop a comprehensive strategy to market and advertise our transit incident reporting solution, making sure it gets out to as many different road users as possible.

• Yuki Asakura (HCDE): Data Lead
  Yuki, an HCDE student familiar with conducting research and survey studies, will be the team’s Data Lead. He will be responsible of collecting data across all tasks to draw insights on the problem space and provide recommendations for our solution.

• Steven Tuttle (CEE): External Coordinator
  Steven is a student in Civil and Environmental Engineering and is familiar conducting research and managing communications for interviews and surveys. He will be responsible for managing external communications between the team and other transit agencies and project mentors.

• Catherine Wang (CEE): Implementation Lead
  Catherine is a civil engineering student with cross-functional experience in technical work with users in mind. She will be in charge of deliverable of technical analysis.

• Anny Kong (CSE): Modeling Lead
  Anny is a Computer Science student skilled in mathematical modeling and software programming. She will take the lead for overall model development, demo implementation and analysis across all tasks.