Gopher State One Call’s GPS-Enabled Locator Program

PILOT: Leveraging Locating to Improve Facility Maps

The Relationship Between Locating and Mapping

DIRT data tells us that utility locates are often late, missing or inaccurate – a nationwide safety issue exacerbated by the significant investment and time needed to update underground facility maps. With sky-high demand for utility locating amidst the current infrastructure boom, creating efficient processes for developing new maps and correcting existing facility maps is essential. Leveraging the data gathered during the locating process to update and enhance facility maps could streamline this crucial endeavor, improving safety and efficiency.

Subsurface Maps

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Summary

Gopher State One Call (GSOC), Minnesota's 811 call center, has undertaken an innovative partnership with vendors to equip damage prevention stakeholders across the state with utility line locators integrated with RTK GNSS accuracy and GPS collection capabilities. This pilot program aims to enhance the accuracy of facility maps, demonstrating the business value of these locating devices and ultimately reducing damages to underground utilities.

Timeline and Scope

In 2020, Gopher State One Call’s Barb Cederberg approached locating technology providers about partnering to help improve the accuracy of facility maps by building the business case for GPS-enabled locating units to be used by damage prevention stakeholders, including engineering/design firms, contractors/excavators, universities, and public and private facility owner/operators.

Two providers – Subsurface Solutions and UtilityLogic – joined Gopher State One Call’s pilot program, providing survey-grade locating devices supported by GIS mapping software to more than 100 participants.

Some pilot program participants used Vivax-Metrotech’s vLoc3-RTK-Pro locator, provided by UtilityLogic for utility line locating and GPS data collection. This tool enables participants to simultaneously locate and collect the GPS position of the utility, used for developing infrastructure maps and correcting legacy data utilizing the owners’ choice of mapping programs. Data files can also be exported in numerous file types for efficient sharing.

Other pilot program participants used Subsurface Solutions’ cloud-based GPS mapping software, SubsurfaceMaps, in conjunction with Radiodetection RD8200SG RTK-enabled locating devices or other Bluetooth-enabled GPS devices like the Trimble DA2 and Juniper Geode. As of July 2024, more than 1,500 users are feeding facility location information data into SubsurfaceMaps, with 60 in the GSOC pilot program, including engineering firms, colleges (owners/operators of facilities) and utility stakeholders.

How it Works

GSOC's GPS-enabled locating device pilot program represents an opportunity to expand the use of this game-changing technology in damage prevention. It enables field staff to seamlessly feed highly accurate facility data back to base maps. This innovative approach addresses a critical challenge faced by a wide range of stakeholders.

The pilot program shines particular light on the benefit of investing in GPS-enabled locating devices for stakeholders such as small municipalities, for whom updating legacy paper maps can be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive. Consequently, municipalities (and other stakeholders) often struggle to meet locating timelines and maintain accurate, up-to-date locate information. By providing free trials of GPS-enabled locating devices to municipalities, GSOC has empowered public works departments and other utilities to showcase the value of these cutting-edge tools. This initiative not only streamlines the locating and mapping processes but has also established a compelling business case that has enabled the purchase and implementation of these devices.

Results

PRIVATE FACILITY OWNER: A mapping engineer for several long-line telecoms reports reducing time in the field by nearly 50% as the result of being able to easily share live map files with project managers.
PUBLIC FACILITY OWNER (MUNICIPALITIES): Numerous public utility managers agreed that the utility’s locator was able to produce more accurate facility maps while performing locates, and that the cities used the device and data not only for water and sewer, but cross-departmentally for asset management.

We never could have justified the cost of this before the pilot, but now I have been able to showcase its value to the city.

- Utility Coordinator, City of Roseau, Minn.

Key Drivers of Success

Easy-to-integrate technology: The GPS-enabled locating devices and accompanying mapping software are easy to use, enabling seamless adoption across all personnel levels and roles. This ease-of-use facilitates comprehensive data collection without compromising mapping data integrity, streamlining the implementation process and maximizing the technology's effectiveness.
Mission-driven partners: Subsurface Solutions and UtilityLogic share GSOC’s vision for providing 811 system end users with ticket-level visualizations of facility maps to make locating efficient and accurate, and reduce damages to buried utilities. These partners provided locating devices and technical support at no cost to program participants, and throughout the pilot program they have shared their expertise with GSOC.
Strength of business case once established: Stakeholders see significant value from the synergies of leveraging GPS-enabled locating devices to develop and improve facility maps in real time. Utility and transportation engineers can plan more efficiently, and stakeholders can leverage an existing process to complete much-needed mapping updates and improve locating efficiency. These locating and mapping improvements will reduce damages to buried utilities.

Next Steps

GSOC, Subsurface Solutions and UtilityLogic are continuing to collect data on relevant outcomes including reduced damages, improved locating timelines, business efficiencies and other key performance metrics to support widespread investments in GPS-enabled locating devices and the process of utilizing them to create and update facility map records.

Inspired by the promising results from GSOC's pilot program, other 811 centers and industry stakeholders are actively exploring the implementation of similar programs. CGA’s Next Practices Initiative will continue documenting these endeavors to facilitate their adoption and success across the industry.

Next Practices Perspective

The Next Practices Initiative Report to the Industry identified GIS-based mapping as a key systemic opportunity capable of addressing many of the damage prevention industry’s most critical challenges. In this use case out of Minnesota, GPS-enabled locating devices that yield survey-grade facility location data were connected to GIS mapping software to prove the concept that the data collected is highly accurate and can support the process of creating, correcting and updating facility maps, ultimately facilitating more efficient utility locating and reducing damages to buried utilities.

As GSOC’s GPS-enabled locating device pilot program advances, CGA’s Next Practices Initiative will track key elements that could be instructive for future efforts:

Structure of policies, practices and procedures supporting the integration of field-collected facility location data into facility maps
Establishment of a data standard to include geospatial accuracy, update cycles, shared attributes and terminology
Impacts of the pilot program on key damage prevention metrics and the business case for implementing similar programs
Lessons learned as the program continues