Report Archive > Common Needs

Task 3 Introduction

This California ITS User Needs Analysis is the final output for Task 3: Update User Needs. This Task provides an update to the User Needs Report developed in 1999 under the Initiatives project. This needs assessment was compiled through extensive document surveys, expert interviews, and core knowledge of the Statewide Architecture Team.  

This needs assessment was compiled through extensive document surveys, expert interviews, and core knowledge of the Statewide Architecture Team. Particular attention has been given to reports, plans, and architecture documentation that have been produced since the release of the original report. Knowledge of regional ITS Architectures and Plan updates that are currently in progress; specialized knowledge of local issues throughout the state and national events over the past several years (since the majority of the plans were developed); and feedback from inventory collection earlier in the project have enabled the Statewide Architecture Team to fill in some of the gaps where ITS plans are outdated, currently being revisited, or not available.  The goal of this task has been to document the current needs in each region of the state in order to determine which are common per the criteria described below.

All documentation received prior to April 2, 2003 was included in this needs assessment.

A key to understanding (and providing comments on) this output is to understand how this information will be used to develop the California Statewide ITS Architecture. The statewide architecture will focus only on:

• ITS systems and services that are statewide in scope
• ITS systems and services that are interregional in scope

This list of needs will be used as a basis for the statewide and interregional services that will be identified in Task 5: Determine Common ITS Services.  The most important needs from the standpoint of the statewide ITS architecture are those needs that should be addressed by services and systems that are statewide or interregional in scope.   These needs are termed “common needs” and will be used in Task 5 to develop a set of common ITS Services and common Market Packages.  

Description of Contents

Each user need has been mapped to three attributes: ITS planning area, outcome, and ITS system.  The user needs can be viewed against any of these three attributes using the Needs pull-down menu above. The mapping to ITS planning area is based upon review of both the original Initiatives Project documentation and planning efforts that have been performed since the original document’s release.  The mapping shown is based upon the documentation reviewed.  Therefore the fact that a need is not identified for a region is a reflection that the need was not expressed in the planning document(s) reviewed.  A total of 12 ITS planning areas plus the Statewide Goods Movement ITS Action Plan were reviewed to identify user needs. The results of this mapping to ITS planning area are used to determine if a user need is a “common need”.  This initial draft has defined four criteria for assigning the “common need” label:

1.  The user need maps to at least half of ITS planning areas (at least 6 of the 12 plans reviewed expressed the need)

2.  The user need is from the Statewide Goods Movement ITS Action Plan (implying it is a statewide need)

3.  The user need is common to adjoining regions (implying an interregional type need) or

4.  The user need is common to at least half of the rural planning districts studied or to at least half of the urban planning districts studied.  This implies needs that are common to urban or rural regions statewide.

Review Comments

An open review period was conducted to verify the completeness and accuracy of the identified needs at a regional, interregional, and statewide level. All comments that were received during the open comment period may be reviewed by selecting the "Task 3 Comments" button above.  This button brings up a page that lists each comment along with it's disposition and an statewide architecture team response indicating precisely how the comment was addressed in this final version of the deliverable.  For more information regarding this deliverable, contact:

Melissa Hewitt

Kimley-Horn and Associates, Inc.
Attn: California Statewide ITS Architecture and System Plan
3780 Kilroy Airport Way, Suite 360
Long Beach, CA 90806
Melissa.Hewitt@kimley-horn.com

Source Database

This California Statewide ITS Architecture deliverable was generated from a Microsoft Access Database.  Download the source database to use Microsoft Access to create your own custom queries and reports of the data presented here.