Hello, and welcome to this Infrastructure-themed GeoSpatial Stream. I’m your host, Todd Danielson, and today’s Lead Sponsor is Bentley Systems.
Today’s Top Story is ETOD. No, I didn’t mispronounce my first name. It stands for Equitable Transit-Oriented Development, and according to an article by Amy Chung at Living Cities, has become a major priority for many regional and local communities. As housing and transportation becomes more costly, decision makers are looking to ensure that all citizens, including those with low incomes, can affordably access housing, jobs, health and child care, and other essential services near transit. Chung notes that ETOD projects often get stuck in the pre-development phase because decisions made by transit and land-use planners that determine public transit routes and infrastructure often don’t consider the site conditions and market characteristics required to support private development. A paper on the subject recommends that market-feasibility assessments be incorporated early in transit planning, so it can support future land development in the area. This requires a better synchronization between land development for transit and other possible future uses such as housing, retail and industry. Basically, research into more than connecting locations and doing so in the cheapest way possible.
That was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this segment from Bentley Systems’ Year In Infrastructure event.
In other news, researchers at the University of Sheffield created the first Global Smart City Ranking to encourage the world’s leading cities to use more and better technology to improve life for their citizens. According to Doctor Alex Peng, from the university’s Information School, “A future smart city will contain a series of highly innovative and intelligent technologies that will affect every single aspect of our lives, ranging from home facilities, to transportation, to education, to healthcare, to energy and many more.” The current index can be found at the Web site shown and contains profiles for 11 of the world’s leading cities. http://smartcitiesindex.gsma.com/smart-cities/
A $1.2 million dollar grant from the Federal Highway Administration spurred creation of the King County Multi-Family Residential Parking Calculator for the area around Seattle, Washington. The neighborhood-level GIS provides data about population density and public-transit availability in a Web-based interface. A key element tracks the ratio of parking spaces to the number of rental units in any given area.
Closer to home, well, my home, at least, the historic Denver Union Station, built in 1881, is getting a $900 million dollar makeover, turning one of the city’s most-prominent structures into a modern transportation hub for the region, with multiple bus, light-rail and other transit modes moving in and out of the station.
And in this episodes “video highlight,” here are some clips from the Global Earth Observation System of Systems showing its effect on infrastructure. I’ll post the entire video on GeoSpatial Stream.
In industry headlines, Bentley Systems introduced its Subsurface Utility Engineering application built on OpenRoads technology, which helps create model intelligence by establishing rules and attributes that are captured and remembered by the system. The application uses a federated approach that can create 3-D models from survey information, CAD artifacts, GISs, Excel spreadsheets, Oracle databases or any other industry-standard source of information.
Esri and Alchemy Management selected five of the nation’s leading fire-rescue departments to take part in the 2014 National Community Risk-Reduction Leadership Program. Esri will train fire-rescue staff on how to use mapping software to identify community risk, establish risk-prevention programs, and prioritize neighborhood outreach and education.
Leica Geosystems added the Leica iCON CC55 controller, a rugged PDA with a 3.5-inch color display, to its iCON construction portfolio. The handheld controls Leica iCON sensors and runs the iCONstruct field software.
Agency9 released its software developer platform, 3DMaps SDK 4.0, with support for HTML5 and WebGL. The platform adds to the existing framework for visualization of large-scale terrain and 3-D city models.
The Maryland Society of Surveyors retained the firm of John M. Palatiello & Associates to provide association management services.
And AEC consulting firm Kleinfelder will be moving its Golden and Littleton, Colorado, offices to Denver in June 2014.
And now for today’s Final Thought … If you’ve been watching the activity on GeoSpatial Stream lately, you’ll notice we’ve been posting a huge amount of content from recent conferences. We simultaneously attended and covered the SPAR International 3D Measurement and Imaging Conference in Colorado Springs and the GEOINT Symposium Tampa, Florida. You’ll also find a recap of the infrastructure-focused Topcon Positioning Roadshow recently held in Denver. All these events have been nice reminders that infrastructure and the larger geotechnology industries are thriving as well as doing a lot of good out there in the real world. I spend a lot of my time in front of a camera or computer, working on GeoSpatial Stream broadcasts and other videos, so it’s important to get out there and see producers, users and all those in between working together to solve the world’s problems. My travel schedule is quite extensive these days, so if you’re going to be at a major event this year, send me a message at my email address, and I’d welcome the chance to meet with you and discuss what’s important to you and what you’d like to hear about in future episodes.
That’s it for this broadcast. I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.
