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.

Ever get one of those awards that makes you take a step back and go "whoa"? We received one of those recently and it caught us off guard (thus the mildly shocked picture of me and Lloyd to the right).

Did you know that as an agency, we have sent out 2.5 million e-mails in the last eight months? Keep in mind these e-mails weren't to just one person; there are over 36,000 of you that we are keeping up to date with information about road closures, construction updates, traffic alerts, mountain pass updates and more.

We were recently awarded an "Excellence in Communications Award" from GovDelivery, a company we use to send out our e-mail updates. We won this award for sending out more than 2.2 million e-mails during the first six months of service. This is even more impressive when you consider their list of clients.

These e-mails weren't subscribers to just one list. We have over 170 different lists that you can subscribe to. Many of those millions of e-mails we recently sent out were due to the crazy weather we had this winter that at one point effectively shut down all north-south, east-west routes in Washington. An e-mail was sent out every time a road was closed or opened during these storms, which was very appreciated by freight haulers and those just wanting to know if they could get home.

We also sent out an e-mail every time the pass report changed, and if you know mountain pass weather this can happen several times a day. Other e-mails were just letting you know what is happening with transportation in Washington and how you can get involved in the decision making process through open houses and environmental document review.

If you haven't already signed up for our e-mail service, you will be amazed at what you can learn and how your commute will improve because you will be one of the first to know what areas to avoid. Be sure to sign up for our weekly "Express Lane", it's a roundup of weekly activities for the agency and a couple of featured projects which can prove to be very enlightening.

If you don't like getting emails, we have all sorts of other ways to keep you informed of what's happening. Here are a few:

• 511 - just call 511 from any phone and get the latest ferry and traffic information
• Our traffic site has almost 400 cameras across the site to let you know what is happening almost anywhere in Washington:
  
• Small traffic site, did you know we had a small traffic site for mobile devices: http://wsdot.wa.gov/small/
  
• Follow us on twitter: @wsdot
• RSS feeds: http://wsdot.wa.gov/news/rss
  
• Crossing the Canadian border? Find out the best times to cross.
• Find out if construction will affect your commute in the Puget Sound area
  

pssst... and stay in touch with this service because we are also hoping to use it to send out text messages for traffic alerts in the Puget Sound area...stay tuned.