Managing Transportation Asset Data Collection During COVID-19: The Origin of NYC DOT’s Spatial Data Gathering Program

The New York City Department of Transportation’s (NYC DOT) spatial data gathering (SDG) program is an initiative that sought to address several issues, including providing employees with relevant work that could be done at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. This program provided NYC DOT with greatly needed spatial data on assets which would cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain if the work was contracted to a consultant—money that, because of the pandemic, was now scarce. The following pages describe a high-level overview of the methods involved in creating and sustaining the program, the metrics tracking the progress of the individual projects, and the lessons that were learned along the way. In sum, this program was able to train in-house resources that were working from home, as well as interns, to capture spatial data on the location and attributes of assets using web-based imagery and applications for both communication and the exchange of data.