Readers of this blog, since the time it was named VIrtual Earth for Government, know that Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth) has been adopted by a number of Department of Transporation agencies that have recognized it as a great platform for building public facing applications, typically to provide citizens with information on road and travel conditions. To date, the list includes Kansas, Louisianna, Ohio, Texas, Seattle, Virginia and the Federal Department of Transporation.

Now Illinois DoT has jumped on the bandwagon but in an interesting way. IDOT is not yet using Bing Maps to help travelers visualize travel conditions across the state but in the spirit of Gov 2.0, to provide transparency of operations; more specifically, showing the projects that are utilizing Federal funding received as part of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

When you visit the site, you can conduct a search of projects by providing different criteria as seen in the screenshot below:

This will bring up a page with a summary of the project(s) you were searching. I chose to not enter any criteria and just hit the carriage return key and received the list below. From this list, I have the option of selecting details for a given project or seeing the project mapped.

Of course, since I'm a map guy, I want to see what these projects look like on the map to get that at-a-glance understanding of where the money is being spent. Notice that once you are in this map mode, you can also search for projects by counties and by specific districts (conressional, senate, house). In typical fasion of a Bing Maps application, when I mouse over the icon on the map for a related project, I get a brief summary about that datapoint with a link to get more details.

Nice to see another DoT putting Bing Maps to work to better serve it's citizens. Congrats IDOT!

-=Virtual Jerry