Transportation logistics

Columbus Wins USDOT Smart City Challenge!

Columbus is the winner of the US Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge, beating out San Francisco, Austin, Portland, Kansas City, Denver and Pittsburgh.   Columbus will receive a $40 million federal grant combined with $10 million from Vulcan Inc. and matched by an additional $90 million from private sector partners.  The award will invest in next generation transportation technologies and services,  including driverless vehicles, advanced traffic analytics and intelligent infrastructure.

Big news – a real game-changer for Columbus!

News articles:

Geographic Information Systems for Transportation in the 21st Century

Miller and Shaw are back in the house!  A new paper by the team that brought you Geographic Information Systems for Transportation: Principles and Applications (Oxford Press):

Miller, H. J. and Shaw, S.-L. (2015) “Geographic Information Systems for Transportation in the 21st Century,” Geography Compass, 9, 180-189.

Abstract:  Geographic Information Systems for Transportation: Principles and Applications (Miller and Shaw 2001) remains the only major authored text on the interdisciplinary field of Geographic Information Systems for Transportation (GIS-T). However, Miller and Shaw (2001) is a product of the 20th century, and the fields of GIS, transportation and GIS-T have changed dramatically in the early 21st century. We are witnessing a revolution in transportation and urban sciences, fueled by a stunning advancement in capabilities to capture, store and process data, as well as communicate information and knowledge derived from these data. This paper is a review of GIS-T in the 20th and 21st centuries. Using Miller and Shaw (2001) as a touchstone, we discuss elements of GIS-T that have stood the test of time as well as new technologies and ideas that an updated GIS-T canon should include.

GIS for transportation goes big at Ohio State

An article in the Big Data Future blog quotes myself and Morton O’Kelly (Director, Center for Urban and Regional Analysis) about Big Data and transportation:

“I can now think of cities as a collection of individuals moving, not just a big amorphous blob with waves of people moving through it,” said Miller. “I want to know how we can build transportation systems in cities such that we can create sustainable development and livable communities.”

Morton, being a good adviser (I did my PhD with him back in 1991), backs me up:

“We have become very used to things like that working without realizing that underneath is an efficient computation underpinning things that allow us to have a smooth operating transportation system,” said O’Kelly.

Read the full post here:  [Big Data and Transportation at Ohio State]