MACURISA2018

The North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority, Inc. (NJTPA) is the federally funded Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for the northern New Jersey region, which is home to 6.7 million people and covers about three quarters of the state. The NJTPA, with support from JMT Technology Group, developed the Planning Recommendations Integration Management Engine (PRIME) based on a prototype developed by agency staff.  PRIME is a web-based relational database system composed of individual geo-referenced records. It contains specific transportation problems (needs) and solutions (recommendations) taken from a wide range of planning studies developed by the NJTPA, its subregions and partner agencies. PRIME enables transportation planning and engineering professionals to enter these records, search through category, keyword and lasso search methods, set connections between the needs and recommendations records and core policies and investment strategies of the NJTPA, query and view records at varying geographic scales, assess them in context with the NJTPA’s performance based planning process and use analysis tools that will help bundle related recommendations into possible projects that could be advanced for further study or implementation.

PRIME provides an intuitive interface for mapping study needs and recommendations, tools for packaging complementary needs and recommendations with information from other planning efforts, analytical tools to draw spatial and non-spatial connections between needs and recommendations, and tools to export reports.PRIME utilizes Esri’s JavaScript API to interact with ArcGIS server.  PRIME’s functionality includes the capability to create project boundaries from existing GIS layers, to support the import of project locations, and to support tracking the history of data entry and editing.  Reporting and analysis tools provide the ability to package data and generate specific reports based on analysis of the system database.  The PRIME report allows for the generation of summaries of the recommendations that have advanced toward implementation phase pull information from complementary agency datasets and produce real-time summary statistics and graphical charts for all attributes and relationships.  The Scoping report assists users with packaging related needs and recommendations based on the location and to specifically define attributes regarding the relationships.  ArcGIS server provides all required spatial analytical functions that are not handled with built-in SQL Server spatial functionality.
The presentation will address the NJTPA’s vision for PRIME, how GIS provides decision support through both spatial analysis and providing spatial context, the key project challenges, and important takeaways from the project.  Slides will be used to guide the presentation and to provide visuals where appropriate.