Location: Albany, New York (30+ locations along the East Coast)
Website: www.vhb.com & www.vhb.com/albany
Employees: 180 New York State / 1,600 Nationwide
Established: 1979
The Company
VHB’s 1,600 professionals include engineers, scientists, planners, and designers partner with public and private clients in the transportation, real estate, institutional, and energy markets, as well as federal, state, and local governments. With locations along the East Coast, including five regionally in Albany, Hauppauge, New York City, White Plains, and Newark, VHB is dedicated to improving mobility, enhancing communities, and balancing development and infrastructure needs with environmental stewardship.
VHB’s integrated services approach leverages a robust line of applied technologies the firm has developed through experience and cooperation with clients and partners. Whether it’s utilizing geospatial technology to pinpoint demographics to enhance decision making or keeping critical projects moving forward by utilizing Big Data, VHB’s team is dedicated to uncovering innovative solutions that benefit the communities they serve.
The following sections cover a few of these technologies, but for more information, please visit VHB’s Applied Technology website.
Geospatial Products and Services:
VHB celebrates a long history with the GIS community, integrating lessons learned and best practices to each new opportunity. As an Esri Business Partner for more than 20 years, and part of Esri’s Business Partner Advantage Program (BPAP) which provides access to Esri’s developers and technical staff, VHB is positioned to understand Esri technology at the highest levels and receive treatment for technical issues and targeted assistance. Additionally, VHB is certified as one of Esri’s ArcGIS Online Specialty partners, which symbolizes the company’s extensive experience in creatively implementing ArcGIS Online/Portal technology within any organization.
Services that are offered by VHB’s GIS consultants include:
Planning Services
- GIS Strategic Planning
- GIS Needs
- Assessments GIS
- Business Planning
- ROI Studies
- GIS Audits
Application Development
- GIS Web Development
- Mobile Application Development
- Spatial Enablement
- System Integration: BI, CRM, document management, permitting, asset management, etc
Support
- On-Call Support
- Technical Training
- Maintenance of Data of Systems Created
- Hosting of Web and Mobile Applications
System Design
- Requirements Analysis
- GIS System Architecture
Correlating GIS Mapping With Data for Healthy Communities
VHB’s innovative Healthy Mobility Model utilizes GIS mapping powered by ESRI to establish a baseline health risk assessment within a designated area by correlating census and published health data with land use, urban design, and mobility data. This assessment, or community health profile, eliminates intensive and time-consuming surveying while identifying and prioritizing improvements.
With the Healthy Mobility Model, municipalities can easily distinguish alternative scenarios and identify factors with the strongest relationships to building better health outcomes while tracking improvements over time. These quantitative results within a given profile help decision-makers think more holistically and support sustainable solutions that consider social, environmental, and economic impacts.
This VHB application combines six census track level disease risk variables to calculate an overall “Healthy Mobility” score. Based on the 2018 data in the application, this Long Island census tract had an overall “Average” risk.
Decoding Parcel Data to Understand Sites
VHB has been creating web-based parcel viewers for county and local government agencies within New York State for more than 15 years. As internet technology and Esri’s solutions changed over the years, their experienced applied technologists have constantly evolved applications to remain state-of-the-art. The core components of all systems include a suite of GIS functionality and a robust user interface that gives users extensive tools for accessing and manipulating parcel data, including searching for parcel buffers, generating assessor’s lists, and accessing assessment information. Many sites also include custom functionality such as the creation of a parcel flyer, the calculation of wetland acreage, and the displaying of documents from other systems.
VHB has implemented numerous web-based parcel viewer applications for local and county governments within New York State, including:
VHB property/parcel viewers integrate a variety of spatial datasets from local, county and state data sources. The applications provide a range of functionality at the parcel level.
Leveraging Big Data and Traffic Analysis to Keep Projects Moving
Collecting traffic data is a critical piece of advancing transportation projects. Intersect, VHB’s latest technology-driven innovation, revolutionizes the way traffic volumes at urban, suburban, or rural intersections are quantified during typical and atypical circumstances. As a transportation planning tool, Intersect combines big data analytics and traditional traffic analysis to identify traffic data at intersections more efficiently than ever before, without the need for traditional manual or electronic counts.
By leveraging big data and traffic analysis through an innovative four-step process, Intersect keeps critical projects, and Departments of Transportation initiatives, moving forward.
Turning Data into Action
Since no municipality is exactly alike, collecting data on buildings can be an incredible challenge, especially when these results are needed quickly and efficiently.
VHB’s Cultural Information Resource System (CRIS) was developed for the New York State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) as a web-based resource information system to catalogue and manage the agency’s huge range of programs and assets. CRIS records and manages data concerning the cultural resources within the State and gives both SHPO and their partner agencies a platform to submit, review and process wide varieties of historic preservation projects—effectively eliminating bottlenecks during a review process. CRIS also eliminates nearly all physical paperwork to help streamline record-keeping.
In the wake of Superstorm Sandy in 2015, VHB launched CRIS Trekker as a mobile-friendly enhancement to CRIS to help SHPO assess the condition of historic buildings and resources within the areas affected by the storm. CRIS Trekker captures real-time data in the field utilizing an easy-to-use interface that allows users to simply fill out a form, take a photo with their device, and submit digitally. The enhanced flexibility makes submitting, storing, analyzing, and managing incoming building surveys faster and more efficient.
In early 2020, VHB launched CRIS Trekker 2.0, a complete re-engineering of CRIS Trekker based on the latest Esri GIS platform. In the field, CRIS Trekker 2.0 has been critical in keeping technicians safe and allowing building surveys to continue.
The combination of CRIS and CRIS Trekker 2.0 has provided SHPO with an integrated digital platform to enable the continued review and processing of incoming projects without interruption during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Improving Mobility & Safety in Communities
VHB designed the enterprise-level Highway Crash Geocoding & Safety Management Systems to help state transportation agency clients improve mobility and communication within the communities they serve. This future-focused technology manages the safety of community streets and roadways, streamlines workflows and processes, and helps agencies (like those listed below) deploy responses with enhanced speed and accuracy.
For NYSDOT, VHB is developing a new, customized suite of applications collectively called the Crash Location and Engineering Analysis Repository (CLEAR) system. CLEAR provides a series of modules for geocoding, editing, and managing crash data while providing tools for conducting the six-step safety management process to improve roadway safety and reduce the number of crashes, injuries, and fatalities within the state.
The CLEAR internal facing password-protected application provides NYSDOT staff a suite of tools to analyze statewide passenger and truck vehicle accident location data. Similar to all of VHB browser-based geospatial tools, the application is built on top of ESRI ArcGIS Online technology.
Managing Assets for Streamlined Capital Planning
VHB’s Smart Asset Management and Inventory System (SAM IS) helps clients keep track of their inventory of physical assets, inspections, and maintenance so that capital planning can proceed without a hitch. The system is built on Esri’s ArcGIS Online platform and designed it to be intuitive and scalable so that whatever the need, clients can track and manage assets without over-spending valuable capital. Since it is cloud-based, SAM IS offers broad accessibility to anyone within an organization with basic Internet access. SAM IS dashboards also readily provide the information needed to help make more informed decisions and deliver projects faster, safer, and more efficiently. Available nationwide, both the City of Albany, NY, and the County of Westchester, NY, currently subscribe to SAM IS.
The VHB SAMIS application provides a wide range of functionality to clients including access to mapped infrastructure features, statistics, dashboards, and an interface connection to mobile data collection efforts.
Contact:
Steve Anderson, GISP
Director, VHB Applied Technologies
sanderson@vhb.com
Editor acknowledges the contribution of Elizabeth Arabadjis in preparation of this article