State and Local Government Make Safer Roads with IoT

In 2010, the northern region of the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities (ADOT&PF) was hit with a new problem: ice. That might sound like something Alaskans should be used to, but in the northern region of state, the ADOT&PF was used to dealing with fluffy snow that could be easily plowed, not a winterlong, two-inch ice layer that came from sudden warming periods followed by cold weather and ice storms. “We were not equipped as a department or organization to deal with things like that,” says Dan Schacher, Fairbanks district superintendent at ADOT&PF. Street icing “seemed to be happening more frequently, so we saw the need to be proactive in the response to these events rather than sitting there and watching it happen.” Instead of taking the costly measure of preemptively salting and sanding roads before every potential ice-producing incident, the ADOT&PF did what a lot of state and local governments around the country are doing: They turned to Internet of Things technology.