The Oklahoma Department of Transportation is helping holiday travelers with two new tools to help them make travel decisions.

“The department is adding snow plow camera images during inclement weather to its online road conditions map. Making these tools available to the public is part of the department’s ongoing efforts to modernize its communication with motorists,” said Terri Angier, ODOT spokeswoman. “These tools will enable motorists to make better decisions about their routes ahead of time, thus hopefully saving them some time during the busy travel season.”

For several years, the department has offered the following online travel tools:

  • oktraffic.org shows real-time travel conditions in the Oklahoma City and Tulsa metro areas and along I-35. This tool helps spot interstate traffic tie-ups giving drivers the opportunity to choose an alternate route;
  • Motorists also can see more than 400 camera views of both metro-area interstates and digital message boards with real-time traffic information on this same map;
  • Traffic advisories are posted to odot.org and motorists also may sign up on this website for those advisories to be sent directly to their email for their areas of interest; and
  • Inclement weather road conditions are posted on an interactive map at okroads.org, which features highway closures by both ODOT and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol during snow and ice events.

The new cameras and sensors are installed on nearly 200 ODOT snow plows mostly in rural areas of the state. These will not be installed on Oklahoma City or Tulsa metro area snow plows because motorists already have access to more than 400 camera views of metro-area interstates through www.oktraffic.org. Additionally, the urban areas are maintained by contractors and these cameras are state owned.

This pilot program is expected to be fully implemented statewide by 2020 at an estimated additional cost of $220,000 and will provide useful weather condition data to maintenance superintendents to better manage their snow-fighting fleet and material usage.

The snow plow camera application was developed in partnership with the Tulsa Intelligent Transportation System Integration Lab at OU.