Lead Balloon Ep. 62 - Modernizing the Way We Communicate About Road Closures (Especially During an Emergency) with Map Apps, feat. Scott Oppmann from ArcGIS

Local municipalities and DOTs need to get with the times.

Most people get travel information about road closures from Google Maps, Apple Maps or a similar smartphone-based application.

But when a road is closed, most transportation agencies put out a press release.

And this disconnect is not only annoying—it can be a public safety hazard.

So after the recent catastrophic flooding in his Southeast Wisconsin community, Dusty wants to start a conversation about how public officials can modernize the way they communicate about road closures in 2025.

Flooding in Southeast Wisconsin.

Because, in order to maximize the impact of potentially life-saving information, municipalities and departments of transportation need to take their message to the channels that the public actually uses.

In this episode, we speak with Scott Oppmann, ArcGIS Solutions Director at Esri. Esri's ArcGIS is the leading mapping and spatial analytics software in its field, allowing organizations to leverage location-based digital insights across a wide variety of fields.

And Esri’s Community Maps Program and Road Closures solution helps local governments get time-sensitive travel information out to the apps that people actually use when they travel.

We'll discuss the imperative for pushing live travel updates to maps apps, different methods for doing so, and why it's important to have a plan in place BEFORE an emergency strikes.

Learn more about Esri's ⁠Community Maps Program⁠ and ⁠Road Closures Solution⁠.

Contribute to ⁠contentpartners.maps.google.com

⁠

Support Wisconsin flood victims: ⁠feedingamericawi.org

Transcript:

Dusty Weis

So the other week as I was driving to work, I turned into the traffic circle by my house and normally I pull out and go south, but I couldn't. That road was closed due to flooding.

So I kept going around the circle and figured I'd just head east because that's the way the downtown is anyway. But that road was also flooded.

So I thought I'd go north, try an alternate route. But guess what? That road was flooded too, and I ended up driving out of the traffic circle the same way that I came in.

Now, if you follow the news, you know that the Milwaukee area was wracked with historic flooding in mid-August, and my little loop-the-loop around the traffic circle was the least of anyone's concerns.

But I think there's an important communications takeaway here, because I was just following what Google Maps told me to do, and Google Maps told me that all three of those roads were open because my local government had not reported to Google Maps that they were flooded out.

And the fact of the matter is, this little story illustrates just how woefully out of date local institutions are in the manner in which they communicate to the public, especially during times of emergency.

Scott Oppmann from ArcGIS

Scott Oppmann

If they're really focused on the impact that they can make for residents in their community, getting that information on the devices they use is the most impactful way they can do that.

Dusty Weis

In the midst of a disaster, even information about road closures can be lifesaving.

I'm Dusty Weis. From Podcamp Media, this is Lead Balloon, a podcast about important tales from the world of PR, marketing and branding told by the well-meaning communications professionals who live them.

Dusty Weis

Thank you for tuning in. Here in Wisconsin, we're fortunate that we came through this recent flood event without any loss of life. Although it was a near thing in a few cases.

But the cost in property damage and loss livelihoods, however, is still being tallied up and the disruption to travel both around and through the area was substantial for a while there.

So I wanted to explore some ways that local authorities can modernize their tactics for alerting citizens about road closures.

And we have the perfect expert joining us today to talk about that. Scott Oppmann is the ArcGIS Solutions Director at Esri. ArcGIS is the leading mapping and spatial analytics software in the space, allowing organizations to leverage location based digital insights across a wide variety of fields. And Esri’s Community Maps program and Road Closures solution helps local governments get time sensitive travel information out to the apps that people actually use when they're traveling. So Scott, thank you so much for joining us here on Lead Balloon.

Scott Oppmann

Thanks for having me, Dusty, I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Dusty Weis

So Scott, back when I was a news reporter and then when I was a spokesman at the city level, if there was any kind of a road closure due to a disaster, a flood, fire or a tornado or something like that, typically what would happen is your PIOs would take all of that information, they'd compile it into a press release.

That press release would go up on the city website and out to the local media, and then the traveling public. The burden would fall to them to listen to their radio station, or watch TV, or read in the newspaper to know about any closures as they were on their way out.

My Gen Z producer is over in his booth right now with his eyes bugging out as I say these things out loud. And I swear it wasn't that long ago that that was the way that it worked.

But in the year 2025, is it enough for municipalities to just send out a press release about a road closure?

Scott Oppmann

Yeah, unfortunately it's not. But it still happens in many, many communities all across the country. And we see that time and time again, right. That residents and visitors that are traveling throughout our communities just aren't getting the information they need on the devices they use every day to navigate.

And we really think we have an opportunity to bridge that gap and connect that authoritative information to the residents and visitors who use it every day.

Dusty Weis

We are both former municipal employees. I know that you worked in data management for Oakland County, Michigan before you took your current position here. So why is that? This is a bit of hard medicine, perhaps, for our brothers and sisters in the municipal government space. But why is that insufficient?

Scott Oppmann

Well, I think one of the big problems is it just doesn't get that information into the hands of individuals as they're using it on their modern devices. You know, you mentioned the Gen Z. Like, I’m old enough to remember when we were planning our trip from point A to point B, we'd go to AAA, we'd get what's called a trip tix, right?

And that would show us the route we were taking. And highlight construction that maybe the Department of Transportation or the County Road Commission was performing. And I think about my daughter now, who's in her early 20s, and she's grown up in that kind of digital native environment, and she uses her device to navigate throughout the community to plan trips.

When I have to take her friends home, you know, they can't tell me where they live, but they can show me on a map and they can send me that location. So they've just grown up using these devices and the expectations of those residents and visitors now, like that is the expectation for governments. Like we need to be able to get that information in the hands of those individuals.

Now, we've seen some of that happening right in some of the consumer mapping systems. Some of that information can be crowdsourced. Some consumer mapping providers have programs that enlist that feedback from governments.

But one of the challenges is just there's a lot of road agencies, road authorities, if you think about it, thousands and thousands just in the US alone. You know, as we traverse through our communities, we don't think about the fact that we're going from a US federal highway to a state or county road to a local municipal street.

And that just in itself is three different road agencies that could potentially be doing work and closing a road for one reason or another. And so just the inherent kind of wicked web of that road responsibility presents to a scale problem, just that there's a lot of them out there.

Dusty Weis

Well, and I think that people have even gotten to the point where, I mean, they're not in the habit of getting information about road closures from newspapers, radio or TV anymore.

I don't even think that they're in the habit of getting it from social media. I mean, there was a day when you could send out a tweet about a road closure and that would be considered sufficient notice.

But I also want to stress that this isn't just a matter of convenience, right? It's not like, oh, those millennials and those Gen Z kids, they just expect everything to be on their phone anymore, right? This can be a matter of life and death. Why is that?

Scott Oppmann

Absolutely. I mean, there's two primary places we see that. Your experience in the recent flooding is a good example of that. You know, being able to communicate at a moment's notice which roads are impacted so people can safely evacuate when a flood may be occurring.

Or, you know, as we see in the Gulf Coast, the hurricanes, which are more slow moving but more catastrophic disasters.

So being able to communicate that information reduces congestion, and it helps get as many residents out of harm's way as possible. And I would also flip that around by saying it also makes it safer for the government employees or the road workers who are out there doing that construction work.

Dusty Weis

Exactly.

Scott Oppmann

Because having that awareness of where those construction areas are and creating a sense of awareness in the driver's hands and the navigators and like, does increase safety naturally because it just hopefully gets people to slow down when they hit those construction areas because there's more awareness about it.

Dusty Weis

Or in disaster response scenarios when you've got a bunch of emergency responders, they need to have the freedom to move their equipment, their trucks in and out of a space, and having people like me driving around in circles in a traffic circle in the way, doesn't help them do that any faster.

I don't want to seem like I'm beating up on municipal communicators here. These shops are very often under resourced, they've got a big job, they've got a lot of plates in the air, and they're public entities, which means that any change in policy has to have a buy in from a whole lot of parties here.

But why has it been so difficult, would you say, for local municipalities, departments of transportation and the like to adapt to get their information out onto the apps that people use to navigate?

Scott Oppmann

Yeah. I don't know if it's so much a struggle adapting. I think they see and certainly the communities we've spoken to absolutely see the value of doing this. Their elected officials do, the operations folks who run public safety and public works see the value. I think, quite frankly, it's just they haven't had simple options to syndicate that data.

It just requires a level of technical capacity and expertise that we don't see at scale in the thousands of road agencies that are there.

Dusty Weis

Not to mention that there's a different API for each service, and you've got to go into each one and upload it there. And that gets us into the service offering that you guys have at ArcGIS. And I do want to get into that in a little bit here, but I'll call out a couple other, I guess what I would say are shortcomings in municipal communications.

And the first being there is a tendency to be very slow to adapt to new methods of communicating. I think back to my time working at Milwaukee City Hall, and it was 2013, 2014, and we still sent out press releases on fax machines at that time. And, I was fairly young at the time. I pushed back on it a little bit.

I said, is anybody really getting these faxes? And I was told, well, you know, it's just kind of the way that we do it. And so we're just going to keep doing it that way and we're not going to make waves. And then at one point my boss went out on an extended leave of absence and I was left to run the shop.

And it just so happened, and I swear I didn't have anything to do with this, that the fax machine broke down at the time. And I maybe dragged my feet for six weeks about putting in the ticket with IT to get that fax machine replaced.

Then my boss came back in and went to send out a press release and said, oh, the fax machines not working. I'm like, yeah, that's been doing that for six weeks. Say, did we hear from any news shops in town who were upset that they didn't get the press releases I've been sending via fax.

And he went, no, we didn't. You know, maybe we don't need that fax machine anymore, right?

And so there's certainly a little bit of, of that attitude, but the other one that I encountered in my time in city government, was this sort of like bureaucratic pushback that, well, we shouldn't share this information because Google and Apple are for-profit companies and we shouldn't be in the business of helping them make money.

How do you respond to that attitude?

Scott Oppmann

Well, I would say probably the most important thing for governments to think about is how do they maximize the impact of that information they have? For many, many years, for the last 20 years, governments have been, as you said, sending out press releases.

They've been using our technology, quite frankly, to map closures, and they'll put maps out on their own websites.

And that's mildly better than the fax machine example that you have. But the reality is, is if they're really focused on the impact that they can make for residents in their community, getting that information on the devices they use is the most impactful way they can do that. You know, we're seeing that. I think there's a recognition that it's more valuable to have that data in lots of people's hands than it is to keep it locked up in just a few people's hands.

Dusty Weis

It can and should be about putting the people first, particularly in municipal government. And usually it is, but I feel like in strategic communication, you know, we talk about strategies and tactics. And too often as communicators, we lean into the tactics partly because they're familiar to us, but we skip right over the strategy part.

I think there's also a predilection, especially among government agencies, to assume that because we are the authority, the people will come to us for information.

And it sounds like you would and I would certainly push back that in this era it is incumbent upon the communicator to meet their audience on the platform where they seek that sort of information if they want to maximize effectiveness. But in the midst of a roaring flood or a raging wildfire, is not the time that you want to be figuring out new software and procedures.

So I wanted to highlight the three options that are out there, and not just for municipal communicators either, because you can report these things right from your own phone.

How To Report Road Closures to Google Maps

The first option is actually available to any user on any one of these apps, and that's just to self-report road closures as a member of the public. That's what I did recently with these road closures that have been vexing me following the flooding here in southeast Wisconsin.

Four steps for anyone to report a road closure on Google Maps.

I just hopped on my Google Maps app, went to the contribute tab, and clicked “Update Road.” That lets me click on a segment of road nearby to define exactly which part I'm reporting, and report the reason for the closure, as well as any other information that I have.

The advantages of this are that anyone can do it fairly easily and that includes public works or public safety employees out in the field. But of course, they're not going to do that unless you train them and give them the imperative to do it.

Google's vague response to my report.

The drawback here, though, is because anyone can do it, Google maps doesn't just post the changes right away. I got an email saying edits are checked for accuracy by our moderation system before being published, without any transparency about exactly what that means.

Info about road hazards seems to appear fairly quickly in most cases when you self-report, although my edit about the flooding still shows as pending, even though the closure did eventually show up in Google Maps after about a day.

So who knows. I can't recommend this method for PIOs without a little bit more info from Google, and they didn't get back to me in time for deadline. They are notoriously non-transparent about this kind of thing.

How DOTs and PIOs Can Report Road Closures to Google

So option two is to use the portal that Google Maps has created specifically for road agencies to report their closures.

Google's API for official agencies to report road closures

If you go to ContentPartners.Maps.Google.com, you can sign up to get verified as a reporting agency and then use their API to report directly from the source directly to the app about road closures, emergency or otherwise.

Presumably since they verified you as an official source, you'll get the information out to the apps much more quickly this way.

Waze, Apple Maps, Tomtom they all have similar programs and that kind of brings us to the drawback of this method, that you have to report a closure to each maps app on which you want to appear.

For municipal PIO shops or departments of public works, that sort of duplicative effort might not be the highest and best use of your time.

And so that brings us to option three, Esri’s ArcGIS Solutions Director Scott Oppmann and the other software solutions that are like theirs.

Scott Oppmann

At Esri, state and local governments are our largest sector. We have tens and hundreds of thousands of customers across the globe that are using our software every day to run operations, to gain new insight and to manage this essential kind of geospatial data, like road closures that we talk about.

Dusty Weis

Not just road closures, but also property tax maps.

Scott Oppmann

Property boundaries, utilities, the condition of the roads, like all that information is being managed inside of the ArcGIS system. So what we wanted to do is build a program that allows our customers to leverage that investment they're making, and just make it really simple for them to not only map those closures in a simple, browser based application, but then join our Community Maps program and share that with the world.

Share that with these consumer mapping applications. So as part of their subscription to ArcGIS, they have access to this program. They can deploy the road closure solution that helps them curate that content, you know, and they can manage the construction closures. If they have special events that are occurring in their community, which happens more and more. And even if they need to these emergency closures that they need to put up, we aggregated into a single feed and then provide it to these consumer mapping partners.

And I would also say that one of the other things that we're doing to help overcome some of this organizational resistance is we're also providing this data right back to the government agencies that's contributing.

So now you think about in your community, the city of Milwaukee, working with the county and working with Waukesha County and the surrounding suburbs. If a major incident were to occur to think about, you know, how they can coordinate closures along roads in uncommon boundaries, they get an intrinsic value in participating in the program too.

Dusty Weis

Now, I don't know for a fact which GIS solutions provider any of our local municipalities are using. I think it's safe to say that some of them are probably into Esri’s ecosystem here, but is it possible that there are municipalities out there that are already paying for this service and just don't know that it exists and aren't using it?

Scott Oppmann

I would say while we're early in the promotion campaign on this one, right in if they're subscribing and using our software to run government operations, it's kind of a benefit of that subscription already. There's no additional cost. And so the great thing is, once they do discover that they can do this right, they have this super power, as we call it.

There's no additional cost to participate.

Dusty Weis

Now, how has the buy-in been? Are there a lot of government institutions that are taking advantage of this and, have you been able to quantify so far the difference in effectiveness for it?

Scott Oppmann

Yeah. We'll talk. So we launched publicly, launched this program in April of this year, and we've been on this campaign over the last quarter to bring new communities on board. We've got more than 50 contributors, big and small, sharing data, everything from state DOTs all the way down to small communities with a few thousand people in it. And that's what's also been very interesting to us, to see that kind of diversity of value.

That also gives us a great deal of confidence, right, that there is that perceived or inherent value in this program. If we're not just getting the big ones that have the technical capacity, we're continuing to march down that every week. We bring a handful of new contributors on board. The information that they're sharing with us is updated every 15 minutes and then provisioned to those consumer mapping partners.

And I mean, it's unfortunate, but like, even some of the during some of the emergency incidents that you mentioned earlier, we had a small community in Kentucky, Elizabethtown, that was an early participant in this program, and they unfortunately suffered the same fate, had some really extreme flooding earlier this spring, and they were able to demonstrate how they could get that closure information right into the consumer mapping applications immediately, as they were shutting down streets and responding to the flooding incident in their community.

So we're seeing it, you know, the impacts of it every day.

Dusty Weis

Slow but steady growth there, certainly. But you mentioned having 50. I would imagine that the goal for the program is probably several orders of magnitude higher. Once you tally up every municipality, every county, every state, every agency in the United States, you'd like to see that number probably closer to 5 or 10,000, I would imagine.

Scott Oppmann

Yeah. And as you know, working in government, governments like to copy other governments.

So we're just creating that critical mass, you know, and we're really, you know, hey, your neighbors doing it, why shouldn't you do it? You know, we find that to be in a very effective way to start to get governments, you know, working on new programs and stimulate, motivate their interest in this.

And we're just working with our teams inside of Esri and with our community of GIS users to let them know that they have options to really open up this information.

Dusty Weis

Regardless of the tool that's used to communicate about it, another absolutely mission critical step in planning for emergency communication as a municipality is to get your plans and procedures in writing before the actual emergency happens. I mean, I can reach out to my local government right now and tell them about this program at ArcGIS, but it's not going to do them any good, because right now they're overwhelmed with information and the ability to communicate it.

What are some best practices, then, that you've developed for the municipalities that are in your ecosystem, for developing a way to get this information out?

Are you running this out through their Departments of Public Works or through their PIOs, or how are you advising them to go about that?

Scott Oppmann

So typically what we see in non-emergency situations, what we'll see is the Public Works Department really has responsibility for these closures because they're issuing what are called right of way permits or access to the right of way. And they're also obviously doing the construction work.

And if your public works department is participating, then you will pick up these closures for construction activity and even special events that are happening all throughout your community.

This road closure data is also a key part of a lot of the solutions we provide emergency management agencies. And I'm sure you've heard it. You've talked about it in the communities you've worked in. You have to exercise this technology during those routine training exercises you do. As you said, you have to be prepared. You have to have the system configured.

Join the community Maps program, right. So it's ready. It's kind of ready and on the shelf. So when you do have to turn it on, it's there and you don't have to do a bunch of work.

Now saying that the other thing we do have, at Esri is a unique program we call the Disaster Response Program. And as you mentioned, we know communities are overwhelmed when an incident does strike.

And so we have GIS resources and expertise we can bring in to help offset the demands that you have locally. And we do that in thousands of communities across the globe. And so this is an example where we could have some technical staff come in when we know you're tied up, quickly stand up the solutions, start to curate that closure information and get you in the program, even though it might be very, very late in terms of the overall lifecycle of preparedness for an emergency.

So there are things there are places we can help throughout that entire process.

Dusty Weis

I would imagine, too, that if there's a PIO or a group of public information professionals who want to get spun up on how to do it, that you can arrange, a training for them to get them up to speed. What does that look like typically?

Scott Oppmann

Yeah, absolutely. We've actually got some videos that are on the web. We've got a destination that kind of talks about the program. And there's a variety of ways we can deliver that training and education. It could be just simple videos that we provide because it is a very simple process, for folks that are used to using technology like that, or we have teams of people at Esri that can go in and do onsite training and onboarding and to get you started.

So it just kind of we tweak that depending on their needs.

Dusty Weis

Well that's awesome. And again, certainly I would say, a life-saving opportunity here, a way for municipalities to get really important information to people in real time as they are using it. Where can we learn more about Esri and the ArcGIS program here?

Scott Oppmann

Yeah, I would say probably the easiest way, quite frankly, just to Google the community maps, road closures and, you know, you can you'll get our destination there. You can go to Esri.com or Solutions.ArcGIS.com as well too. And just search for road closures. And it'll bring you all the information you need to help either join the program as a municipality, or, you know, a road agency that wants to contribute your closure data.

Or if you're a consumer mapping partner that might be interested in accessing this data, right, to enrich your user experience. We're talking to both types of organizations to grow the program. So, yeah, so that's probably the easiest way to find some more information about it.

Dusty Weis

Well, that's fantastic. And I'll drop a link in the podcast episode description as well so it's clickable there for anybody who wants it.

But I've got to say, Scott as kind of an emergency nerd, this is something that's right up my alley. I know that PIOs have a lot to balance, especially during times of emergency. And what we're talking about here is a second priority, right?

The first is life saving communication, but the second is communication that helps emergency responders do their jobs better and keeping drivers out of emergency zones certainly does that.

I think back to my time as a news reporter in Madison, Wisconsin, during a massive blizzard in 2010 when, a couple of semi-trucks jackknifed out on I-39, shut down traffic in both directions, and if they had been able to reroute those people off of the interstate, it would have been a much better situation.

Instead, there were literally thousands of people stuck out on the interstate running out of gas in their cars, shivering. They were running supplies out to them on snowmobiles because they couldn't go anywhere.

Most of that could have been avoided if a little warning would have popped up on their Google Maps or their Apple Maps or their Waze, and just told them, hey, why don't you exit at Stoughton Road and just avoid this whole problem that's coming your way?

So I think it's really cool what you're working on, and I appreciate your taking the time to tell us about it. Scott Oppmann, ArcGIS Solutions Director at Esri, thank you so much for joining us here on Lead Balloon.

Scott Oppmann

Thanks so much for having us.

Dusty Weis

And thank you for tuning in. Here on Lead Balloon, we like to take a look at the PR and marketing stories that are a little bit too weird or nerdy or detailed for the other comms podcast to touch, so we hope to see you back here in this feed again sometime soon. Follow us on your favorite podcast app or check out our YouTube page.

Lead Balloon is produced by Podcamp Media, where we provide branded podcast production solutions for businesses. Our podcast studios are located in the heart of beautiful downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but we work with brands all over North America to help them launch and build podcasts that work. Check out our website, PodcampMedia.com.

Music for this episode by Neon Beach, Sound Engineering by Matt Covarrubias.

And until the next time, folks, thanks for listening. I'm Dusty Weis.