Vehicle crashes often occur in highway work zones, leading to injuries, fatalities, congestion, and inefficient roadway management. According to the National Work Zone Safety Information Clearinghouse, 2024 alone saw an estimated 113,000 work zone crashes, leading to 41,000 injuries and 850 fatalities—including 285 deaths involving commercial motor vehicles and 156 pedestrian fatalities.

To combat this crisis, the U.S. DOT Volpe Center’s Work Zone Data Exchange (WZDx) team partners with data producers and consumers to standardize how work zone information is shared. By channeling this standardized data to third-party mapping and navigation providers, this initiative ensures vital information reaches drivers in real time, allowing them to safely navigate active construction zones.

Central to this effort is the WZDx Feed Registry, a clearinghouse overseen by the U.S. DOT Volpe Center team that has been downloaded 187,000 times since launching in 2020. Since July 2025, a multidisciplinary team of U.S. DOT Volpe Center planners, engineers, and analysts has significantly scaled the registry by onboarding 10 new and updated data feeds, including Idaho Transportation Department, Indiana DOT, Michigan DOT, Illinois DOT, and Oregon DOT. This rapid expansion brings the registry to 40 active data feeds as of June 2026.

To support this growth and ensure data integrity, the team developed and refined an internal data feed monitoring dashboard. This tool allows the team to continuously check active feeds for non-compliance or systemic errors, while simultaneously coordinating with infrastructure owners and operators—typically state DOTs—to perform rigorous feed validations and quickly resolve any technical questions.

Recognizing that technology alone isn’t enough, the U.S. DOT Volpe Center team has strategically expanded its outreach to drive broader adoption. The team actively engaged regional stakeholders, including the I-80 Corridor Coalition and The Eastern Transportation Coalition, to uncover the practical barriers preventing states from adopting broader WZDx. Through these partnerships, the team is gathering critical insight into state DOT-specific requirements for capturing, managing, and sharing work zone information. By deeply exploring these challenges, the team can better tailor its technical assistance, refine future iterations of the data specification, and build data-sharing frameworks that seamlessly integrate into existing state DOT workflows.

This foundational success has already paved the way for next-generation advancements. Building directly on the WZDx model, the Institute for Transportation Engineers formalized the specification through a rigorous systems-engineering process, publishing the official Connected Work Zones (CWZ) standards in 2025. The U.S. DOT Volpe Center leveraged its deep experience with WZDx to support the new CWZ standard, guiding the standard development process, performing feed validation, and developing supporting dashboard tools. State DOTs are already transitioning: Colorado DOT became the first organization to update its feed to the new CWZ standard in 2025, and both Massachusetts DOT and Illinois DOT have since published their own CWZ feeds.

Looking ahead, the U.S. DOT Volpe Center’s deep institutional knowledge is driving the expansion of these data streams to tackle new environmental variables. Following an intensive series of stakeholder meetings held throughout 2025 and 2026, the team is preparing to launch new incident and weather event data specifications, anticipated for publication in fall 2026.

About the U.S. DOT Volpe Center

Since 1970, the U.S. DOT Volpe Center has advanced transportation innovation for the public good, providing multimodal applied research, collaborating with federal, state, and industry partners, and multidisciplinary technical leadership and expertise to solve complex transportation challenges. Learn more at www.volpe.dot.gov.