Features That Should Be Common To State DOT Websites

[J N Winkler]

4. Publicly accessible detailed plans and drawings. I like how MTO includes the drawings of stuff like light poles and sign structures on the site but they should put the plans on too.

MTO does put the construction plans online, but only for purchase.  You have to register for an account and you must supply payment details before you are shown a download link:  billing is per project.  Additionally, MTO's advertised project listing is very hard to use (slow to load, information is arranged so as to maximize number of clicks required to access relevant details, does not work well in browsers other than Internet Exploder).

Most other Canadian provincial transport ministries follow a similar model of charging fees for construction plans, although the details differ.  Alberta Infrastructure & Transportation uses CoolNET, which is a third-party planroom site for which you can buy a time-limited subscription that gives you access to whatever happens to be on the CoolNET site during the validity period.  MTQ uses a separate third-party site which will make construction plans available for download for free, but in order to view them in Acrobat you need to have a special plugin which will download a dynamically generated key from the site and use it to decrypt the plans in Acrobat.  You must pay to obtain PDF versions of the plans which do not have this limitation.  BC MOTH advertises through the BC provincial government's BC Bid E-procurement platform, for which a C$100 annual subscription is required to download construction drawings.  I am not aware that there is electronic availability for YT, NT, SK, or any of the Atlantic provinces with the exception of NB.  NB, by the way, is the only province whose transportation ministry makes construction drawings available for download free of charge (but registration is required).

Aside from the cost and hassle of getting construction drawings in electronic format from Canadian provinces, which is worse than for most US states with the exception of those who publish drawings through Bid Express, and also worse than for most E-plans-publishing European countries with the exception of Germany, there is relatively little of roadgeek interest.  The main purpose of publishing construction drawings is to find a contractor to do the work, and Canadian provinces seem to do most of their signing either in-house or through term-limited supply contracts which do not require drawings for the signs to be made available at the time of advertising.  The main exception is Alberta, where turnkey contracts for road construction do include signing.  However, to my knowledge Alberta has never done a pure sign rehabilitation contract.

I am hoping that the Canadian provinces will loosen up on electronic plans.  MTO did have to give up on having the Ontario Traffic Manual available in hardcopy format only.  But it will probably take at least a decade.

[joseph1723]

MTO does put the construction plans online, but only for purchase.  You have to register for an account and you must supply payment details before you are shown a download link:  billing is per project. 

Thanks I didn't know that MTO had plans on their site but it's kind of pointless paying for plans for roadgeeky purposes though.

[bulldog1979]

[For old maps, do any of your respective states' universities have a huge (online) library? For example, down here, the University of Florida has this site http://ufdcweb1.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc/?a=mapfl where they've scanned county maps from FDOT from the 1930s to present day.]

I don't know about the universities here, but the Library of Michigan in Lansing has an archive of most, if not all of the official state maps the the Michigan State Highway Department/MDOT have released. On request, they'll scan most documents for a reasonable fee on a large drum scanner. I was charged $1/piece for 71 different maps, plus $1/CD for the two discs to hold them all. They had to do each map in two passes because the pre-2004 maps are wider than the scanner area, so I have a strip for the Western UP. One of these days I'll merge the TIFFs together in Photoshop to produce combined files.

[architect77]

NCDOT has everything: Construction updates, current and future project info including funding, TIP plans over the next five years, corridor studies, etc.

I'm always impressed with the depth of information provided, such as this which includes a great slideshow of the Yadkin River Bridge replacement project, now underway. If you've ever crossed this narrow bridge, you know how scary it is....
http://www.ncdot.gov/projects/i85corridor/