The Office of Transportation and Air Quality (OTAQ) is tasked to find new, creative, and intelligent ways to reduce nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide, and particulate matter found in emissions. One program at OTAQ to confront this challenge is the Smartway program. This partnership is a collaborative effort between EPA and the freight industry to increase energy efficiency in a mutually beneficial way that also reduces greenhouse gases and air pollution. The objective of this project is to eliminate all unnecessary long-duration truck and locomotive idling at strategic points along major transportation corridors in the U.S. One way that this is achieved is though advanced technology such as IdleAire that provide truckers with a hook up to electricity, heat, air conditioning, and Internet when they are parked at a truck stop so that they do not need to idle their vehicles.

EPA's Smartway program managers were faced with the challenge to provide more tools for access to EPA information to regional stakeholders, such as air planners, around the country. The Smartway program needed a way to provide regional air planners with more information to use for their decision making and communications with stakeholders. In addition, the EPA needed to let planners know if fuel-saving strategies were being adopted in their regions. To do this the Smartway program wanted to make maps available to the public showing 8-hour ozone attainment zones for every county in every state. In addition, the Smartway program wanted the public to have access to locations of trucks stops in their states and the resources available to truck drivers at these stops including technologies such as IdleAire. A further need of the Smartway program was to share the benefits of adopting the SmartWay program best practices with regional planners and companies in the freight industry.

PPC worked with the client to create a first-of its-kind interactive web application to present idling emissions sources (truck stops) nation-wide and provide emissions data on each. This application is called the Idling Reduction Interactive Mapper (IRIM). The application, a first for OTAQ, incorporated data for more than 4,000 truck stops across the U.S. and rendered them on a GIS generated, interactive map. The web-enabled GIS interface will allow stakeholders to observe spatially the locations of truck stops and areas in non-compliance with the Clean Air Act (8-hour non-attainment zones). Participation by Smartway partners and stakeholders is necessary for the success of the emission reduction program the EPA seeks to build. With IRIM Smartway partners will be better equipped to commit to measure and improve the efficiency of their freight operations.

The IRIM tool identifies emissions locations, amounts of emissions, program partner locations, and the potential emissions benefits of partner locations that adopt SmartWay practices. It also includes a data layer for 8-Hour Ozone non-attainment areas to support the efforts of regional air planners.

The IRIM application will fulfill the SmartWay Partnership's objective of clearly demonstrating program benefits for idling emissions and is a complementary information management application to other OTAQ tools for program outreach. Now stakeholders will be able to implement the Smartway program results in air quality plans like state implementation plans, transportation and general conformity, and new source review offsets.

Not only does the IRIM tool fulfill all of these demands, but the application is scalable to add idling locations such as rail yards and shipping ports and is easily updated for necessary data changes.

PPC was able to build the first interactive GIS mapping interface for the Office of Transportation and Air Quality. To build this tool PPC worked closely with EPA SmartWay program managers to verify design guidelines and EPA information technology capabilities and valuable insight into EPA enterprise architecture. The application passed all EPA review cycles to date and is in final review before public release via the EPA Website. During the process of creating the IRIM tool, PPC was also able to advise the Office of Transportation and Air Quality of critical information management gaps not supported by their enterprise architecture. PPC created the IRIM tool within the confines of the client's schedule, information technology standards, and risk and cost thresholds. As a result, the IRIM tool is a perfect example of PPC's ability to successfully build and implement projects in a cost-efficient, timely manner.