Intelligent Transportation Systems - City of Oakland

The City of Oakland should use the integrated maintenance management system to plan
for ITS maintenance needs. An effective equipment replacement program, based on
expected equipment life-cycles, can reduce response maintenance costs. A planned
cycle of equipment replacement for each type of equipment in the inventory will be
recommended by the maintenance management system and these recommendations
should be followed by the City. Most equipment will need to be replaced in 10 to 20 year
cycles.
MTC is taking the lead on developing regional databases of ITS projects and traffic
signals. They are developing the Regional ITS Architecture, which will include an
inventory of ITS elements, and maintaining a regional traffic signal database for the Bay
Area. It will be important to keep both of these inventories updated; therefore, the City of
Oakland should coordinate regularly with MTC to ensure that the relevant City of
Oakland information is kept current in both databases.
Ready availability of spare parts is also critical to effectively maintaining ITS and traffic
signal systems; however, too large an inventory of spare parts is not cost effective.
Agencies often keep spares in a ready state in the shop or in the maintenance
technician’s truck so that they can be used to replace a failed device in the field. This
provides a means to affect a full and rapid repair in the field and permit the failed device
to be completely repaired in the shop where comprehensive diagnostic tools are
available and weather elements can be avoided. Spare components suitable to the
maintenance demand should be kept on hand for repairs to equipment.
The best way to determine appropriate numbers of spare parts is to track failures,
calculate mean time between failure (MTBF) and mean time to repair (MTTR), and use
these statistics along with established maintenance practices to determine the number of
spare parts needed. However, until a track record is established, the City of Oakland will
have to determine their spare parts inventory based on experience from other agencies.
The spare parts inventory should be related to number of devices in the field.
Traditionally, a 10 percent figure has been recommended for inventory of ITS spare
parts; however, that figure is generally too high for traffic signal controllers. For
controllers, 2% is a better number to use.
Based on these percentages and the near-term recommendations for City of Oakland
ITS deployment (see Section 8), it is recommended that Oakland maintain a spare parts
inventory that initially includes:
• 14 spare traffic signal controllers
• 3 spare CCTV cameras
• 3 spare MVDS
• 1 spare DMS
This should be sufficient for the next five years until the near term projects are built out.
As more ITS elements are added to the system in future years, the size of the spare
parts inventory will need to increase proportionally.
9.5 O&M FUNDING
The recommendations presented to this point cannot be effective without the proper
funding level. Funding is required to provide the appropriate staffing levels, purchase
City of Oakland ITS Strategic Plan
118 September, 2003