Forsyth County Enhances Data Accuracy and Reliability with ArcGIS Roads and Highways

With hundreds of thousands of people relocating each year, Georgia has seen an influx of new residents looking to enjoy the amenities of the Peach State. Forsyth County, located in the northeast region of Georgia, was the state’s fastest-growing county, according to the 2020 census. This rapid population growth means the county must upgrade or expand infrastructure like housing, health-care facilities, and transportation systems that keep the county moving.

The Forsyth County Engineering Department, which includes the Roads and Bridges Division, is responsible for road maintenance for approximately 1,200 miles of asphalt roads and 30 miles of gravel roads across the county. The engineering department works in tandem with the geographic information system (GIS) team at Forsyth County to maintain and update data. The GIS team is tasked with developing, maintaining, and distributing GIS data and technology.

The engineering and GIS departments are each responsible for maintaining their own representation of the roads and their characteristics. The data maintained by the GIS team is used to track the roads that the engineering team oversees.  The data also supports applications for funding for various initiatives. The engineering and GIS teams previously maintained road information in separate databases, which made it difficult to sync data and ensure staff had the most current information.

The GIS team deployed ArcGIS Roads and Highways to unify the two databases to maintain roadway characteristics in a common road centerline. The implementation of this tool has improved data accuracy and efficiency by consolidating data into a single source, enabled more accurate quality assurance and control, and enhanced data accuracy for the county.

Linear referencing is the method of storing and geographically locating data using relative positions along a measured line feature. The Forsyth County GIS team previously used this method and kept transportation projects in a linear referencing system (LRS). However, linear referencing was not included in the local government information model that the county adopted.

The GIS and engineering teams are responsible for maintaining different datasets and workflows, but the lack of a linear referencing system meant their two separate databases were not connected. Al Luthringer, GIS database administrator on the Forsyth County GIS team, explains that road asset information created by the engineering team was kept in a separate SQL database that had no spatial component.

Engineering would request maps or reports from the GIS team, which the group would then have to create, but there was no way to sync the two databases together and ensure they had the most up-to-date data. Luthringer says that trying to keep the databases in sync involved a lot of manual work that was very time-consuming.  

For example, the engineering department applies to receive funding from the Georgia Department of Transportation for road resurfacing, and the amount is based on the miles of road they maintain. As such, when engineering would request data from the GIS team for their grant application, it would be a rush to prepare everything.

“We were trying to come up with a way to keep these two things in sync because a couple of times a year, we’d be scrambling to try and get the data in their database into GIS because they would need a report or a map,” says Luthringer. “It’s necessary for them to have up-to-date information on what they maintain so that they can get the appropriate funding.”

The lack of synchronization led to data inaccuracies. If the engineering group made a change in data, Luthringer explains, there was no process in place to keep the information in sync and no alerts set up to notify the GIS team that changes were made. The GIS team had to manually look for any differences.

“We didn’t really have the manpower to do that either. It’s just very labor-intensive,” says Luthringer.

Michael Bellino, the GIS manager at Forsyth County, adds that another difficulty was trying to maintain multiple copies of one geometry. The two groups would have different representations of the same roadway characteristics, and keeping everything in sync was a challenge. He says, “There’s a lot of work to get everything back into one common centerline.”

Generating year-end reports for the engineering team also became challenging as more attributes were added to the workflow. Bellino says it took much more time for Luthringer to produce reports because the data took longer—weeks, in some cases—to consolidate. 

The GIS team, led by director John Kilgore, was tasked with finding a solution that would drive innovation and progress while unifying multiple workflows into a centralized solution. The search led to the discovery of ArcGIS Roads and Highways. This solution helped unify these databases and allows both departments to efficiently manage route and event data from the two sources.  

Luthringer watched a video demonstration of the Event Editor application, a mapcentric web app that supports linear referenced event data editing, available in ArcGIS Roads and Highways. The process of using the app seemed straightforward and user-friendly, so he reached out to Esri to learn more.

He says that Event Editor and other tools in Roads and Highways would help them easily see who is responsible for maintaining a specific road in a more mapcentric way.

Luthringer also chose Roads and Highways for its flexibility, which allows it to manage asset information that is not always intersection to intersection. The linear referencing system is agnostic to a variety of digitization standards that are all built off a centralized route network. The tool dynamically preserves associations and builds derivatives for the representation of these segments.

“The advantage is basically you can go by a full named road, a part of a named road, regardless of intersection to intersection. That’s kind of what attracted me to it,” says Luthringer.

Bellino says they knew it would be a lot of work to meet the needs of the GIS and engineering teams as well as to implement a new product, so they reached out to Esri for assistance. Their Esri account manager connected them with Esri Professional Services, who helped them with the ArcGIS Roads and Highways implementation project.

“We already had an existing product that was kind of molded and conformed into the already existing best practices from Esri, and then we built out from there. We knew that if we implemented it properly, it [would be] a better tool long-term,” says Bellino.

The GIS team performed some data cleanup before its work with the program, and the professional consultant worked with the group to do the data conversion to Roads and Highways. “It was a good experience, and it set us up with a good solution that now we’re able to manage and maintain,” says Bellino.

The use of Roads and Highways has yielded positive results for Forsyth County, including increasing efficiency and data accuracy. Roads and Highways delivers a one-stop shop for road data management, with Bellino noting that the groups now have a single consolidated source of information. This also means data management is simplified and troubleshooting is better because it’s much easier to identify errors.

“For managing all the layers and all the workflows we have, I have a lot of peace of mind that we’re not chasing down five different centerlines with different attributes in each, that we’re [now] chasing down really one data source and all the events,” says Bellino.

Patrick Perkins, GIS specialist at Forsyth County, explains that if something is overlooked when the engineering group is editing data and attributes, the GIS team can highlight the areas where editing may be incorrect and control workflows through coded value domains. This ensures the values are entered accurately for the road characteristics.

Having data in a central location also makes quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) more accurate. According to Perkins, the county has more people with the ability to view specific features based on the event layers hosted by the GIS team. The engineering department can now see in real time what items need to be evaluated and updated. 

The data accuracy has improved with Roads and Highways. For example, Perkins says domain picklists are updated with items like road names or subdivision names through a few models to meet the growing demands of Forsyth County. Staff utilize the up-to-date picklists for data entry. This ensures value accuracy and conformance to the Georgia Next Generation 911 standard.

“That carries over to our end-of-year reporting, where we’re able to accurately represent data with as few errors as possible or not omit things that should be there, and vice versa,” says Perkins.

The improved data accuracy has also helped with the engineering department’s road resurfacing initiative. Previously, they examined data for the project on spreadsheets, but Luthringer says now they can be more methodical in accurately choosing the roads that need resurfacing and provide better data visualization.   

“This process has been enhanced by enabling data-driven decisions, reducing the reliance on guesswork,” says Luthringer. “The complete dataset has allowed holistic analysis on all roadways conditions, and the roads that need repairs the most are getting prioritized, which is a benefit to the county.”

The workflow for editing data is now streamlined with Roads and Highways. Perkins says the workflow is in task order inside the editing document in ArcGIS Pro. Tasks aid users through sequential steps by guiding them through a repeatable workflow. This has allowed them to streamline what tools need to be run to do a specific function and helped automate tasks to save time.

“With the task-driven workflows through ArcGIS Pro to support Roads and Highways, Patrick [Perkins] was able to implement tasks, which I think [eliminated] a lot of manual typing and spelling errors,” says Bellino.

Daniel Wade, senior GIS database administrator at Forsyth County, adds that with the automation, they could eliminate a lot of batch processes that are running in the background and after hours. Previously, the GIS team made edits and then used scripts to push those geometry or attribute changes across to other features. Now, the team can edit the features directly within Roads and Highways.  

There may be some instances where the GIS team has events of similar value that may apply to an entire named road. In a recent example, Perkins says that the data entry workflow for maintenance in the county is faster because they can apply an event from a beginning cumulative measure to the endpoint instead of having to do a maintenance event segment by segment.

Perkins says, “It offered us a lot more flexibility in our workflow to more accurately identify where these changes might be occurring, such as surface type.”

The feedback has been positive from others in the county. The IT department was able to retire the redundant database instances now that data has been consolidated into one system. Also, staff enjoy the visualization of roadway data that helps them catch potential errors faster.

“The county is working on modernizing and embracing new technology and . . . the shift is always towards embracing new technology to make workflows and things more efficient, more traceable, more accountable, more transparent,” says Bellino. “And I think all the checkboxes were hit on this one solution.”