By guest blogger Claudia Bingham Baker

We are pleased to expand its service for receiving real-time and pre-planned information on highways in Olympic and Southwest Regions. We invite you to visit our GovDelivery self-subscription service and sign up for information by following the directions below. Once you’ve subscribed, you may modify or cancel your subscription at any time by signing in and clicking on ‘subscriber preferences.’ 

1. Follow this link to our self-subscription page.
2. Choose a subscription type (either email or text) using the pull-down menu.  Please note that depending on your data plan, you may incur costs associated with receiving text messages.
3. Enter your email address in the e-mail address box.
4. Click on the GO button.
5. You will come to a “Quick Subscribe” page.  On that page you will see an extensive list.  Scroll through the list to see the myriad options you have available. You may choose to receive information on as many or as few topics as you wish. 

Options include:

Traffic and Traveler Updates (focuses on Puget Sound and urban highways)

• Mountain Pass Conditions
• Eastern Region Traffic
• Olympic Traffic (new under GovDelivery pilot project).  This list will send you information about unplanned, real-time highway alerts about collisions or other highway incidents.  
• If you click the “Olympic Region – All Traffic Alerts” box, you will get notifications of real-time events within Pierce, Thurston, Kitsap, Mason, Clallam, Jefferson and Grays Harbor counties.
• If you wish to limit the geographic area of interest, choose box(es) listed under Kitsap Peninsula, South Puget Sound, or Olympic Peninsula.

Southwest Traffic (new under GovDelivery pilot project).   

• If you click on “Southwest Region – All Traffic Alerts,” you will receive information about unplanned, real-time alerts about collisions and other highway incidents in Lewis, Pacific, Wahkiakum, Cowlitz, Clark, Skamania and Klickitat counties. 
• If you have interest in a more limited geographic area, click on the appropriate geographic list under that.

Similar information is available on planned, scheduled events. Should you wish to receive information about scheduled construction and maintenance work, please go through the same exercise in the next section under “Construction Reports.”

Once you choose your area(s) of interest, click on the Submit button at the bottom of the lists. Your subscription has now been recorded and you will start receiving information immediately.

FOR MEDIA ONLY:  Please note that contact numbers will no longer be included with each roadway notification.  To contact communications specialists, please refer to the Communications contact page.

Benefits to the new system:

• Information will be more timely.
• Information will be brief and succinct, easily read on mobile devices.
• Information will be more comprehensive.  You will now receive notifications of scheduled roadway work as well as unscheduled roadway incidents.
• Information will be more relevant.  You can subscribe to as many or as few lists as you wish.

The pilot project will last through December 2013, after which we will evaluate the program’s effectiveness and the level of public satisfaction. We welcome your feedback any time during this six-month project.  Please send comments or suggestions to webfeedback@wsdot.wa.gov.

Whenever possible we like to provide you with the most updated information.   Unfortunately this can sometimes lead to a bit of information overload.    We took a step back lately to assess what information we are sending out and how it is working and one of the areas that caught our eye is with how we report mountain pass conditions via email.

When you go to a Web site to look for real-time information you expect it to be there.  That’s why we update the pass report conditions for the major passes (Snoqualmie, Stevens, etc) whenever those weather conditions change.   That way you know you are getting the latest information available.  This type of reporting works well for a Web page, but we are finding it doesn’t work well for an email.   We have been using our email system to report the same real time conditions for mountain passes but because these conditions can change so often we have found we are sending up to ten emails a day.

This is where you come in. Do you want to continue receiving an email every time the weather conditions change on the mountain passes, or would you rather only be notified when the restrictions change (traction tires advised/required/chains required)?

If we only reported on restrictions it would significantly cut down on the number of emails you receive in your inbox and would give you the most valuable information you need regarding the passes. Changing to restrictions only would also enable us to send you a text message instead of an email, because of the length of the pass report this isn’t currently available. What do you think?