Intelligent Transportation Systems - City of Oakland

• Signal Technicians - 5.5 FTE
With an expected increase in the inventory of ITS equipment, the emphasis may tend to
shift to responding to malfunctions and failures rather than activities to prevent
malfunctions and failures. To adequately provide preventative and response
maintenance functions, the City’s traffic signal maintenance staff will need to be
increased. The City’s existing staff feels that an additional 2 FTEs should be adequate
to maintain the anticipated ITS devices and traffic signals. However, based on
experience in other agencies, it is recommended that the City ultimately have at least 14
FTEs dedicated to maintenance of ITS and traffic signals. This is an increase of 8
FTEs over the City’s current staffing level. For the near term though, until more ITS
devices and infrastructure are deployed, an additional two FTEs for maintenance should
be adequate.
These staffing recommendations are based on current staffing levels at similar sized
Cities in the Bay Area. For instance, the City of San Jose, which operates about 800
traffic signals and two dozen CCTV cameras, plus other ITS equipment, has 6 FTEs for
Operations and 17 FTEs for Maintenance. Furthermore, the City of Menlo Park
recommends one traffic signal technician for every 50 traffic signals and one traffic
signal engineer for every 100 traffic signals to ensure adequate O&M of their traffic
signal system. This is a common rule of thumb in the traffic industry for determining
O&M staffing requirements. This translates to approximately 14 technicians and 7 traffic
engineers for the City of Oakland’s 700 traffic signals, which is fairly consistent with the
previous recommendations.
For most of the ITS elements, the City should continue to staff their maintenance and
operations activities with in-house staff. This may require hiring new staff to meet the
recommended staffing levels or shifting City staff from other duties. If the City has
available maintenance staff but they are in need of training before assuming the role of
system maintenance, the contractor to be awarded the system deployment contract can
be required to provide operational support and training to City personnel for a specified
period of time. At the end of the operational support period, the City would assume full
responsibility for the maintenance of system. If the City does not possess the necessary
resources and is not in a position to commit to long term maintenance of the corridors,
contracting of maintenance operations is a viable option.
Table 9.3 illustrates some benefits and risks resulting from outsourcing O&M
responsibilities.
Table 9.3 – Outsourcing Benefits and Risks
Outsourcing Benefits
Risks
Clear separation between agency and
contractor responsibilities.
Agency can decide what tasks it wishes
for the contractor to perform with its
own forces.
Little flexibility to get services outside
the specific scope without extensive
administration and additional cost.
Little incentive for the contractor to
exceed performance standards of
accomplishment criteria.
City of Oakland ITS Strategic Plan
115 September, 2003