Iowa’s Trucks Park Here provides real-time information on available truck parking spaces for public rest areas, private truck stops and other privately owned facilities along Iowa’s I-80, I-29, I-35, I-235 and I-380 corridors. The system connects to 41 truck parking facilities, including 24 public rest areas, 15 privately owned truck stops, one privately owned restaurant and one privately owned casino. Three additional sites will be connected to the Iowa network within the first quarter of 2019.
The Iowa project was part of a larger Mid America Association of State Transportation Officials (MAASTO) initiative that was funded in part through a $25M federal Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant awarded to a group of eight partnering states – Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. While each state had a responsibility for implementing its own TPIMS solution, the systems will eventually work together to provide a regional TPIMS.
The Iowa Department of Transportation received $3.4M in MAASTO grant dollars to fund the $4M Trucks Park Here project with a portion of the overall costs covering three years of systems maintenance and operations.
“eX² Technology took an innovative and cost-conscious approach to designing Iowa’s TPIMS solution,” said Phil Mescher, a transportation planner with the Iowa Department of Transportation. “eX² incorporated existing pole and site infrastructure into the TPIMS design when possible, used low power consumption and solar powered solutions and worked independently to procure non-traditional parking site facilities to increase the overall number of truck parking spaces within the TPIMS network.”
The Iowa TPIMS is unique in that its components are fully automated with a remote network monitoring system that provides operational, health and accuracy alerts and relies on a hybrid of detection methods to accurately assess available truck parking spaces, including screenline and space occupancy technologies such as in-ground sensors and video analytics. The truck parking data is transmitted using a wireless network and rapidly processed by the Truck Smart Parking Services Osprey® software platform, to deliver the information to a public data feed for use by the Iowa’s 511 Traveler Information System as well as third party, in-cab routing systems and hands-free, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration-compliant mobile apps.
“We’re really pleased with how seamless the project implementation went and the overall effectiveness of the solution,” said Kyle Hildebrand, vice president, project development, eX² Technology. “We leveraged our success with the Colorado DOT TPIMS deployment to deliver a reliable and economically feasible solution that was right for Iowa. In the process, we perfected a standardized, off-the-shelf product that we can implement quickly throughout other states across the country.”