An illustration of the ALLOC 6B location-allocation analysis system, 1984

The programs included in this Discussion Paper no. 17 are Distance, Unravel, Retrench and Alloc 6B that deal with location-allocation analyses first published in 1973 by the Department of Geography, The University of Iowa.

Office of Location and Environment Manual, August 2009

This manual captures the experience of practitioners in the Iowa Department of Transportation’s (Iowa DOT’s) Office of Location and Environment (OLE). It also documents the need for coordinated project development efforts during the highway project planning, or location study phase and engineering design. The location study phase establishes: * The definition of, and need for, the highway improvement project * The range of alternatives and many key attributes of the project’s design * The recommended alternative, its impacts, and the agreed-to conditions for project approval The location study process involves developing engineering alternatives, collecting engineering and environmental data, and completing design refinements to accomplish functional designs. The items above also embody the basic content required for projects compliant with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 19691, which directs federal agencies to use a systematic, interdisciplinary approach during the planning process whenever proposed actions (or “projects”) have the potential for environmental impacts. In doing so, NEPA requires coordination with stakeholders, review, comment, and public disclosure. Are location studies and environmental studies more about the process or the documents? If properly conducted, they concern both—unbiased and reasonable processes with quality and timely documents. In essence, every project is a story that needs to be told. Engineering and environmental regulations and guidance, as documented in this manual, will help project staff and managers become better storytellers.

Linking Real Time and Location in Scheduling Demand-Responsive Transit, September 1996

The role of rural demand-responsive transit is changing, and with that change is coming an increasing need for technology. As long as rural transit was limited to a type of social service transportation for a specific set of clients who primarily traveled in groups to common meal sites, work centers for the disabled, or clinics in larger communities, a preset calendar augmented by notes on a yellow legal pad was sufficient to develop schedules. Any individual trips were arranged at least 24 to 48 hours ahead of time and were carefully scheduled the night before in half-hour or twenty-minute windows by a dispatcher who knew every lane in the service area. Since it took hours to build the schedule, any last-minute changes could wreak havoc with the plans and raise the stress level in the dispatch office. Nevertheless, given these parameters, a manual scheduling system worked for a small demand-responsive operation.

2 Iowa Safety Efforts: Analyst Tool & Location Aggregation Project, July 8, 2003

Report produced by the Iowa Department of Transportation about Iowa Safety with Tools and Aggregation.

Location referencing system team report : final report, 1998

This report is a culmination of the Location Referencing System (LRS) team. The team was charged with defining a system that coordinates the collection storage, and access to location referencing information by developing an LRS to be used throughout the Iowa DOT.

An Optimum Allocation Approach to Closing or Relocating Highway Maintenance Garages in Iowa, 1981

Highway maintenance engineers and administrators are often confronted with a number of problems related to highway maintenance work programs. One of these problems is concerned with determining the optimum number and locations of highway maintenance garages in a given area. Serious decline in highway revenues and a high inflation rate have made it necessary to examine existing maintenance practices and to allocate reduced financial resources more effectively and efficiently. Searching for and providing of reasonable solutions to these problems is the focus of this research project. The methodology used is to identify and modify for use (if necessary) those models which have already been developed. Models which could give optimum number and locations of highway maintenance garages were found to be too theoretical and/or practically infeasible. Consequently, research focus was shifted from these models to other models that could compare alternatives and select the best among these alternatives. Three such models -- the Alabama model, California model, and Louisiana model, were identified and studied.

Water Rights and Allocation, January 2010

Iowa Department of Natural Resources commitment to improving the management of both the quantity and quality of water resources, a committee was formed to assess the current policies and practices regarding water rights and allocation, and to make recommendations that would assist the state in moving toward a sustainable future. Water allocation concerns have been raised again in the past few years as increases in the demand for water are projected due to ethanol production, geothermal heating-cooling, and potential irrigation expansion.

GIS-Based Accident Location and Analysis System (GIS-ALAS) Project Report: Phase 1, 1998

This report summarizes progress made in Phase 1 of the GIS-based Accident Location and Analysis System (GIS-ALAS) project. The GIS-ALAS project builds on several longstanding efforts by the Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT), law enforcement agencies, Iowa State University, and several other entities to create a locationally-referenced highway accident database for Iowa. Most notable of these efforts is the Iowa DOT’s development of a PC-based accident location and analysis system (PC-ALAS), a system that has been well received by users since it was introduced in 1989. With its pull-down menu structure, PC-ALAS is more portable and user-friendly than its mainframe predecessor. Users can obtain accident statistics for locations during specified time periods. Searches may be refined to identify accidents of specific types or involving drivers with certain characteristics. Output can be viewed on a computer screen, sent to a file, or printed using pre-defined formats.