Utah DOT Modernizes Winter and Street Operations with ArcGIS Velocity

Transportation agencies rely on accurate, up-to-date information to keep highway, rail, pedestrian, and other transit systems running smoothly. For the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT), that means tracking vehicle fleet activity, understanding roadway conditions, and supporting programs that operate not just during major weather events, but year-round.

Using ArcGIS Velocity, UDOT has built a real‑time geographic information system (GIS) that brings together live data to support transportation operations in one connected view. By integrating vehicle location and telemetry data, weather feeds, and business systems in ArcGIS, UDOT has improved visibility across multiple programs, reducing system complexity and creating a foundation that supports both daily operations and long‑term planning.

UDOT’s technology and innovation group’s central GIS division supports a wide range of internal teams, including maintenance, environmental services, emergency management, and risk reduction. According to Ben Teran, GIS administrator at UDOT, the group is responsible for maintaining the core systems that staff rely on across the agency. “We develop and maintain the systems that all of our users use, including GIS professionals,” said Teran. “We have different enterprise portals that help various areas manage the services and apps they provide.”

Before adopting ArcGIS Velocity, UDOT relied on a combination of ArcGIS GeoEvent Server (an ArcGIS Enterprise extension for ingestion and analysis of streaming data) and FME workflows to ingest vehicle location data through APIs. While functional, the approach required constant monitoring, and data updates involved delays. “It wasn’t exactly real time, but it was as close to it as we could get at the time,” Teran explained.

These limitations made it difficult for UDOT to support the operations critical to year-round transportation management, particularly those with reporting requirements or a need for precise tracking.

When ArcGIS Velocity became available, UDOT saw an opportunity to simplify their real-time architecture while expanding what was possible with live data. As a software-as-a-service capability, ArcGIS Velocity eliminated the need to manage servers and reduced the complexity of maintaining real-time feeds.

“We were looking for a more cloud-based solution that was simpler and easier to run and maintain,” said Corey Unger, GIS program manager at UDOT. “With Velocity, we’re more or less just taking the data and adjusting it straight into our ArcGIS platform.”

Direct integration with data providers also made it easier to get started. One of the first integrations UDOT implemented was with Verizon Connect Reveal, which provides automatic vehicle location (AVL) data. “That was very intriguing for us, and was one of the first use cases that we employed with ArcGIS Velocity,” Teran said.

One of UDOT’s continuous operations is street sweeping, which is carried out across the state to support environmental compliance, roadway maintenance, and public safety. Keeping track of where sweeping has occurred, what remains, and how work progresses toward annual targets and regulatory compliance goals requires timely and reliable information.

To support this work, UDOT used Esri’s Street Sweeping Operations solution, part of the ArcGIS Solutions collection, as a starting point to build a street sweeping operations application powered by ArcGIS Velocity.
 

ArcGIS Velocity ingests and processes live sweeper data to provide precise tracking of where work has occurred. Analytics determine when a sweeper’s broom is actively engaged, ensuring that only true sweeping activity is recorded.

“It wasn’t as accurate before as it is today,” Teran explained. “If the broom is down, that’s when it’s recording that it’s sweeping.”

Critically, the system also connects GPS data to the correct side of the road, allowing UDOT to track sweeping at a more detailed level on highways and interstates.

Supervisors can filter the data by maintenance stations, known as sheds, to see progress within their assigned areas and track miles swept toward annual goals, helping the agency meet reporting requirements more efficiently.

Beyond street sweeping, UDOT uses ArcGIS Velocity to bring together data from multiple systems that support day‑to‑day operational awareness. Rather than working with each data source in isolation, the agency relies on Velocity to ingest and manage real‑time and near real‑time information in a single environment.

These feeds include fleet data from Geotab for additional vehicle assets, road weather information system (RWIS) data that provides temperature and road condition information via JSON, and SeeClickFix submissions that capture issues reported by the public.

ArcGIS Velocity also allows UDOT to combine streaming data with tabular business systems and other extract, transform, and load (ETL) outputs. This makes it easier to analyze operational information in context and across programs, rather than managing disconnected datasets. “Velocity has really allowed us to integrate these multiple data feeds together to create better analytics,” Unger said. “It helps bring department‑wide data together into one location to enable analytics that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

While ArcGIS Velocity supports many year‑round programs, it also plays an important role during winter weather events. Using Velocity and Esri’s Winter Weather Operations solution, UDOT developed a winter operations dashboard that shows snowplow locations, recently plowed routes, storm events, and estimated costs. “It started as two separate projects that merged into one,” Unger said. “We had a public-facing map that showed where our snowplows were, as well as where they had recently plowed.”
 

By combining live fleet data with financial systems, UDOT can better explain the realities of winter operations to leadership and legislators. “We’ve seen the snow, we can see it piling up,” Teran said. “But how do we quantify and show and tell the story of what that really looks like, and what it means for residents?”

ArcGIS Velocity has helped UDOT simplify infrastructure processing, minimize manual monitoring, and tailor dashboards to specific audiences. The same real-time architecture is now supporting a developing equipment tracking application designed to improve fleet utilization statewide.

“UDOT manages about $227 million of equipment,” Unger said. “So having an application that allows us to track and help with the maintenance of those vehicles is very important.” Improved fleet management and tracking of fleet resources not only reduce overall expenses but assist in the process of requesting additional resources when necessary.
 

As they expand use of ArcGIS Velocity across multiple programs, UDOT has been able to simplify how operational data is managed and shared across teams. Bringing real time and near real time information into a common GIS framework has reduced the need for separate systems and manual processes, making it easier for staff to focus on the information most relevant to their roles.

That same approach is now supporting additional efforts beyond street sweeping and winter maintenance. UDOT is developing an equipment tracking application that uses the same real time foundation to improve visibility into fleet usage across the state. By understanding where equipment is located at a given time and how it is being used, the agency can make faster, more informed decisions about sharing resources between maintenance stations.

Rather than building one off tools for each new need, UDOT has established a repeatable way to bring in live data, analyze it alongside existing business systems, and apply those insights across different programs.

Starting with a focused set of operational requirements and extending from there has allowed the agency to adapt its GIS environment as needs evolve, supporting both daily work and future projects.