pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

This past week Wednesday, October 19, 2016, PacTrans hosted its quarterly Regional Transportation Seminar at the University of Washington. The special guest was Dr. James Tsai, a Civil Engineering professor from Georgia Tech. He delivered a presentation titled, Smart City Transportation Asset Management and Safety Analysis Using Emerging 3D and GPS/GIS Methodologies.

Consistent among the projects discussed, Dr. Tsai talked about how much less expensive many currently expensive technologies will soon become due to the emergence of the autonomous vehicle. LiDAR was one of the examples used. Foreseeing this significant drop in cost for fairly advanced sensing technology, he and his students have been working to develop new methodologies that implement such hardware. More specifically they have been using it for collecting roadway characteristics data and developing methodologies for identifying conditions and predicting dangerous roadway sections for roadway safety improvement.

He went on to assert that because so much more information can be collected at such a faster rate with these new technologies, it is conceivable that their work could effectively document how roadway imperfections (ie. cracking) spread and at what point potholes are formed. The moral of this story is that new technologies, and there affordability, open vast new opportunities for more efficient and cost effective data collection across the transportation field.

PacTrans would like to extend a huge thank to Dr. Tsai for taking the time to speak with us.