Hello, and welcome to this Infrastructure-themed GeoSpatial Stream. I’m your host, Todd Danielson, and today’s Lead Sponsor is Esri’s Geodesign Summit.
Today’s Top Story is Crossrail, a groundbreaking £15-billion-pound project to build a new 118-kilometer railway line in London and its surrounding area. It’s one of Europe’s largest infrastructure projects, and also one of the most complicated projects to adopt Building Information Modeling, or BIM, across its construction.
Bentley Systems was the lead company in the BIM modeling, establishing UK’s first Building Information Modeling Academy specifically for this massive project.
Crossrail began construction in 2009, and isn’t expected to be operational until 2018, but was recently in the news as the tunnel boring was completed in June 2015. The milestone was celebrated by Boris Johnson, prime minister and mayor of London, and this video showing a “drone’s eye view” of the completed tunnels was released.
That was today’s Top Story. That was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this interview clip from Esri’s Geodesign Summit.
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration announced nearly $3.4 million dollars in grants for states and local agencies to explore innovative new pricing approaches to reduce traffic congestion, overcrowding of transit systems and parking shortages during peak travel times.
According to U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, “Increasing strain on the transportation system is one of the challenges our nation will continue to face in the upcoming decades.”
The government of Canada celebrated the official start of construction on the New Champlain Bridge, one of the largest construction sites in North America. The $4 billion dollar project is expected to be completed in 2019.
And check out this interview in Informed Infrastructure with Patrick MacLeamy, CEO of HOK and creator of the MacLeamy Curve, which emphasizes design earlier in the construction process. He discusses the impact of BIM and public-private partnerships, and he as his own curve! Right? How cool is that?
www.informedinfrastructure.com
In industry headlines, Remote GeoSystems released two new Esri-based geospatial full-motion video inspection and reporting solutions: LineVision Esri ArcGIS and LineVision Esri ArcMap Add-In, which can be used for electric utilities, oil & gas pipeline, environmental, transportation, security and other critical infrastructure-inspection applications.
IMAGINiT Technologies partnered with Pix4D to help architectural, civil and manufacturing design engineers extract imagery taken from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and convert it into usable 2-D and 3-D models.
GRAPHISOFT introduced Cloud storage access for its BIM presentation app, BIMx.
Innovyze released SCADAWatch 3.0, its network data-management and business-analytics and optimization solution for water-distribution systems.
And Flightline Geographics and Tablerock Land Survey partnered to provide 3-D aerial imagery from UAVs for pipeline and electric-transmission projects across North America.
For today’s Final Thought, I’m passing along an Internet tip I learned while writing this episode. I found this clip of the tunneling machines used in the Crossrail project, and I was impressed (and jealous) that it had almost 700,000 views. Then I noticed that a similar video about the World’s Longest tunnel had more than 2 million views! This led me to notice that a whole slew of videos with world’s largest or world’s tallest or world’s … whatever, it didn’t seem to matter … had millions of views!
So now that I showed that clip, I’m including World’s Longest tunnel somewhere in my search engine metadata, and don’t be surprised to see a future episode of GeoSpatial Stream with a headline of World’s Largest Map or World’s Largest Satellite Groundstation. Sometimes you just gotta play the game, and apparently bigger is still better when it comes to Internet searches …
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I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.
