When a major hurricane threatens Florida, transportation officials need to know not only what traffic conditions look like now, but where they are headed. During Hurricane Milton in 2024, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) used RITIS Probe Data Analytics (PDA) Performance Charts to help leadership track evacuation traffic and determine when Emergency Shoulder Use (ESU) might be needed.
FDOT monitors speeds and traffic volumes on evacuation routes for conditions that may warrant opening the shoulder as an additional travel lane. But waiting until those conditions are reached leaves less time to prepare. Hourly reports featuring RITIS Performance Charts allowed leadership to see how conditions were trending, giving FDOT, law enforcement, and other partners more time to prepare for a potential activation.
FDOT has refined this process since Hurricane Ian in 2022, standardizing its PDA dashboards and making Performance Charts a key part of its evacuation reporting. During Milton, ESU was activated on I-4 eastbound, I-75 northbound, and Alligator Alley toward Florida’s east coast. The charts helped FDOT communicate the buildup in congestion and showed substantial speed improvements on I-75 and I-4 after the shoulders opened.
“During an evacuation, it’s critical that we give leadership a clear picture of how conditions are changing and where we may need to act. RITIS Performance Charts help us turn the data into visuals that decision-makers can quickly understand and use.” — Joseph Casper, FDOT
For FDOT, the lesson is simple: emergency data needs to be more than timely—it needs to be immediately understandable. RITIS Performance Charts help turn complex traffic data into clear visualizations that decision-makers can quickly interpret and act on. Their advice to other agencies is to practice reporting before an emergency, build repeatable processes, turn information around quickly, and make everything sent to leadership self-explanatory.
