Real-time roadwork visibility with FME and Waze integration

The City needed to provide easy access to up-to-date, reliable information about roadwork and obstructions

With a population of 174,000, Sherbrooke is the sixth largest city in Quebec. Guided by their core values, the City’s GIS experts continuously develop innovative solutions to support management decisions. Their agile, collaborative approach drives projects across departments and enhances communication with residents through tools and interactive maps.

The City’s urban infrastructure and roads departments, key players in planning and delivering road projects, faced a busy year with three major initiatives affecting mobility for residents and visitors. Given the mission of the GIS department, it was important to share clear obstruction information to prevent traffic issues and reduce impact on residents.

FME emerged as the only tool capable of meeting all of the city’s goals and constraints

While the existing interactive map displayed current road construction and obstructions, it was not readily accessible to visitors and did not offer route planning options. To meet the City’s primary goal of improving mobility, the new solution had to:

– Be easily accessible to both residents and visitors

– Offer route planning options

– Display the actual progress of the road works and obstructions (which can change quickly and do not always follow the original timeline)

– Be developed within a tight two-month timeframe to coincide with the upcoming roadwork season

Development for the new solution also needed to ensure the data model currently used for feeding the interactive map and existing work processes was retained, while also being able to process imperfect digital information digitized directly by site managers.

After consulting with experts from Safe Software partner, Consortech, the city’s GIS analysts determined that the most effective strategy would be to use FME to transfer information to the Waze navigation and traffic application. The team needed to understand the data structure, how it needed to be transformed, and identify the necessary workflows required to upload the data into Waze.

The City’s input data included incident points with road work descriptions, road network information, and road closure polylines, with a requirement that the data being exported to Waze’s API be in JSON format.

FME was used to transform the data and link the incident type points layer to the road network. The main technical challenge was the road closure data, which was represented by freehand lines on an interactive map designed for site managers. To ensure accurate reporting, Consortech developed a Python script to integrate with FME and link the closures to the road network for error-free reporting.

Completed in time for construction season, the new process allows for quick information transfer as construction sites progress, integrating directly into Waze. This project has greatly improved mobility for residents and visitors. Despite the growing number of major construction sites, the city has not seen an increase in resident road obstruction complaints.

With the GIS team freed from most of the project coordination work, they were able to focus on delivering the projects included in the City’s annual plan, helping to maintain their solid internal reputation and continue to delight their internal clients.