The 2009 Federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) has been reformatted to work on a smartphone. It needed to be done. I grew tired of using the official MUTCD PDF file on my computer. It is cumbersome to find anything. I wanted something that I could take out in the field where I could find something almost immediately. So I approached the MUTCD app by asking the question “How can I create a MUTCD user interface that is intuitive and fast?”. Hence, I went to work. I got the electronic base files from the Federal MUTCD team, and confirmed that the manual was public domain from their team leader.

I spent several weeks off and on looking over other app interfaces deciding how I wanted to approach it. I looked over medical apps that essentially function as a pill reference book. I reviewed similar legal apps, and perhaps most importantly, I listened to a lot of music. It was while listening to music that I decided to base the MUTCD app on a similar user interface to the “Albums” section of Apple’s Music (previous iPod) app. It’s a user interface that most are familiar with, and it could be optimized to work fast with a basic search engine.

If you are someone who deals with traffic control devices on a regular basis (civil engineer, contractor, public works personnell, etc.), you are going to really like it. Type in “truck” under the sign tab, all signs with “truck” in the description appear. Type in “raised pavement marker” under the text tab, and all sections with “raised pavement marker” in the title appear. All signs in the MUTCD app appear graphically in an easy to read drill down table format. You get the idea. If you use it with an iPhone 4S, you can even search using speech. Now all I need to do is incorporate the camera for image recognition.;) Take care, Gary

The Android operating system. It is without a doubt the most interesting operating system available for smartphones and tablets. There are over a hundred pieces of hardware running some version of it, and more importantly, one can buy a low end smartphone for under $100 USD off contract.

So based on the above paragraph, you are probably wondering why Trafdata hasn’t released an Android based app yet? First, I’m concerned with how sales would translate to the Android ecosystem. Secondly, while the TurnCount app can easily be designed to run on it, the challenge comes with trying to satisfy all the available hardware. Little items like a sliding keyboard opening during field data collection and how the graphics scale between different size screens create issues. Finally, it appears that I would have to offer substantial customer support that isn't priced into the app.

But, what about the MUTCD app? It’s a simple drill down app similar in many ways to Android’s contact feature. Combine the MUTCD app with inexpensive Android based hardware, and it is less expensive than buying the hard copy book directly from AASHTO’s, IMSA’s or ITE’s online bookstore. So how does the traffic engineering community get one created? Well, first I’d like to offer any professional organization, university or other business an offer that will allow me to distribute an Android version FREE to all users. For $3,000 USD, I will advertise your respective company on the initial splash screen for 3 months. During those 3 months, I will offer the app for FREE on the Android MarketPlace. After 3 months, I will either start charging a fee or pursue more advertising. Is there anyone willing to take me up on the offer? How about some SEC schools (or soon to be)? Take care, Gary

The above banner may be a little dramatic, but the life cycle of the traditional count board is coming to an end. Smartphones and tablets will eventually replace the traditional count board. They are easy to use, affordable and can be just as accurate when designed properly. Whether it be Apple iOS or Android based devices, costs will continue to decrease, and the hardware will continue to improve. We’re going to see extremely low cost, manual data collector apps on one end and automated vision based data collectors (Abacus 2.0, Miovision, Juno, etc.) on the expensive end. Everything in between is going to struggle.

One of the main reasons for preparing TurnCount (and my next app to be released in a few weeks) was to not allow the traffic engineering industry to miss out on the mobile computing phenomena. For various reasons, the profession is usually about 5 to 10 years behind others with respect to software. I’ve decided to accelerate the transition from count boards to these capacitive touch screen devices with the next version. TurnCount now exports to the popular traffic engineering analysis software, JAMAR’s PetraPro. It creates the necessary .JCD file to reprocess. Click here to download an example of TurnCount's output files. Rather than using a count board that costs about $1,000 USD, you can now collect turning movement data for PetraPro with an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. I think you’re going to like it. (Please note that I am not affiliated with JAMAR).