VDOT Northern District Operations
Description: The VDOT Northern District Operations operates and manages the VDOT roadways and facilities in the VDOT NOVA District and a part of the VDOT Fredericksburg District. The VDOT Northern District Operations operates the Traffic Operations Center and the Traffic Signal System, operates snow plows and the safety service patrol.
Stakeholder Groups Associated With:
Inventory Elements:
Projects:
Roles and Responsibilities:
Archived Data Management
- Provide traffic archive data to VDOT ADMS.
Emergency Management
- Supports coordination of evacuation plans among federal state and local transportation, emergency and law enforcement agencies that may be involved in a large scale evacuation
- Coordinates evacuation plans among allied agencies and manages evacuation and reentry of population in the vicinity of a disaster or other emergency that poses as a risk to security
- Interface with other transportation management agencies to support coordinated emergency response involving multiple agencies
Freeway and Corridor Management
- Collect and process automated traffic data from traffic speed monitoring sites
- Share traffic information with other traffic agencies like DDOT ITMS or CHART
- Utilize current technology to optimize the flow of traffic on access controlled highways
- Manage and monitor traffic on freeway mainlines and on-off ramps using field equipment including cameras, inductive loops, and non-intrusive equipment
- Manage HOV lanes by coordinating freeway ramp gates and connector signals with HOV lane usage signs
- Monitor weather conditions along freeways
- Propose and facilitate the appropriate dissemination of incident related information to travelers and potential travelers
- Provide the communications and roadside equipment to support ramp control, lane controls, and interchange control for freeways
- Provide the roadside elements of traffic information dissemination including DMS and HAR
Incident Management
- Provide the Safety Service Patrol to respond to incidents and disabled vehicles on interstates.
- Share information on appropriate dissemination devices such as DMS and HAR
- Track incidents and responses
- Propose and facilitate appropriate traffic management strategy to reduce traffic flow impact
- Provide resources when requested by emergency/incident management agencies
- Provide the capability to disseminate the information relating to the response status to other agencies
Maintenance and Construction
- Collect and archive maintenance and construction data for off-line planning, research and archiving
- Collects current road and weather conditions using data collected from environmental sensors deployed on or about the roadway.
- Communicates and tracks maintenance and construction vehicles and other equipment to ascertain progess of their activities
- Repair and maintain of ITS equpiment on the roadway (signs, traffic controllers, traffic detectors, DMS, signals, CCTV etc)
- Disseminate maintenance and construction activity coordination to centers that can utilize it as part of its operations, or to the ISPs who can provide the information to the travelers
- Maintain AVL systems for maintenance vehilces
- Manages winter road maintenance, tracking and controlling snow plow operations, roadway treatment (e.g salt spraying and other material applications) based on weather information
- Peforms vehicle maintenance scheduling and manages both routine and corrective maintenance activities on vehicles and other MCO equipment
- Provide numerous services for scheduled and unscheduled maintenance and construction of roadway system or right of way. Maintenance services would include landscape maintenance, hazard removal (roadway debris, dead animals), and routine maintenance activitiies (roadway cleaning, grass-cutting)
Parking Management
- Support electronic payment of parking fees
- Determine and distribtue dynamic status of individual parking lots (full, open etc)
- Manage parking reservations, parking lot use and revenue collection for VDOT park and ride services
Snow Removal and Weather Related Operations
- Collect Weather information from various sources (subscription weather services, national weather service, FEMA etc)
- Coordinate with NOVA Local Emergency Responders for incident clearance and snow removal activities
- Track Maintenance Vehicle Fleet Location and resource usage. (including AVL implementation)
- Use weather information for operations decisions such as road closures, maintenance strategies, resource mobilization
- Disseminate weather information to travelers, and media through 511, HAR as well the internet
- Perform Snow-removal operations on interstate and surface streets in the NOVA region.
Surface Street Signal Management
- Adjust signal timing in real-time from a centralized traffic signal control system.
- Recive signal priority and preemption requests where available
- Continuously monitor the real-time signal status, collect traffic flow information using CCTV and loop detectors
- Coordinate with other regional agencies during emergencies and evacuation for emergency traffic control
- Use Surveillance technologies to detect and verify incidents
- Install, and maintains over 1400 traffic signals in the three counties - Fairfax, Prince William and Loudon. It also operates Fredericksburg Signal System.
- Manage regional traffic control efforts and assist in coordinating traffic across boundaries
- Monitor maintenance, construction, and winter road conditions along key arterials
Traveler Information Services
- Collect and diseeminate traffic conditions, advisories, incident information, maintenance and construction information, winter road conditions, air quality and weather information to other agencies including adjacent TOCs, other regional traffic managemnet agencies like CHART, DDOT ITMS/TOC, CAPTOP, and private ISPs
- Install and maintain detection (CCTV, Radar) and dissemination devices (DMS, HAR)
- Provide customer services including customer complaints, incident information and maintenace and construction information
Last Updated 3/4/2025
