On May 14, 2025 at noon EDT, the DEP API VDOT event data output will be transitioned to use the VDOT SmarterRoads TMDD feeds. This transition, required by VDOT,  will mainly impact the contents of the output rather than the structure of the output. Some of the key changes and improvements will include the following:

• Exclusion of manually entered Transurban events in VDOT event output (i.e. events with “HOT OC” source type) – for Transurban Express Lanes events, users should use system=vdot_transurban parameter instead.
• Exclusion of inactive planned events (i.e. planned events that do not have status set to “active”).
• Inclusion of responder information and operator notes that were previously available, but were eliminated during the initial enhanced SmarterRoads transition.

These changes will improve the overall accuracy of VDOT event data through exclusion of events that are more accurately defined and available elsewhere (e.g. Transurban events endpoint) and events that are not active on the roadway and generally have inaccurate or uncertain information (e.g. planned events). You may notice that the overall number of available events in the VDOT event output may be significantly smaller, and that’s to be expected due to exclusion of events referenced above.

In addition to content changes, there will be two data elements that will no longer exist in the VDOT event data output since they no longer exist in the source feeds:

• created_tstamp (users should use start_tstamp instead)
• regional (this flag is no longer available)

On April 29, 2025, INRIX released their 25.1 map update. Based on the DEP team’s assessment, the update included roughly 4,226 new XD segments, and roughly 2,014 modified XD segments in Virginia. The DEP API real-time output using INRIX segments accounts for any newly added, removed, or modified segments. For users with access to the PDA API, data after April 29 will be reported using the new map. We expect to update the historical data to reflect the new map as much as possible by June.

On April 25, 2025, DEP will officially decommission the legacy INRIX data endpoints (/rm3p/dep_speed_tt_tmc and /rm3p/dep_speed_tt_xd) as announced in December 2024. INRIX data will still be available using the endpoints deployed in December 2024 (/rm3p/dep_inrix_tmc and /rm3p/dep_inrix_xd) which contain the full complement of of INRIX data available to DEP.

On April 25, 2025, DEP will also include a new <latestFeedTimestamp> element in parking data output for data sources that supply that information. The goal of adding this element is to indicate when the source last updated data to help DEP data consumers understand if data is current (even if it hasn’t changed), or if data is stale.

On March 24, 2025, the DEP API KITS data output now includes the newly added phase movement numbers. These numbers describe various movements defined at intersections (e.g. “Northbound Right”, “Northbound Thru”, “Northbound Left”, etc.). The new elements are available within the <phaseMovements> element in the signal inventory output. Additional information is available in the “Section 2.3 KITS Traffic Signal Supplemental Information” in the DEP API reference documentation.

On March 17, 2025, the DEP now includes the weather forecast data in GRIB2 format as provided by the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). These files are update once an hour and provide geographic coverage for the entire continental USA.

On Sunday, March 16, 2025 between 4am and 8am, the University of Maryland Division of Information Technology will conduct a set of disaster recovery network resiliency tests that could cause intermittent service interruptions to DEP. This is a regular annual activity and it generally results in no discernable impact or at worst several seconds of connection interruptions over the entire duration of the test.