Workshops

BAAMA's July Educational Session

GIS in Transportation

Transportation is a primary economic driver in our society and enables the movement of people and provides access to goods and services. As dynamic systems, transportation networks constantly evolve to serve California's growing population and its ever-changing spatial distribution. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and related technologies play an important role in efforts to map, monitor, and model our existing transportation networks, as well as plan for the future. The three speakers for this educational meeting are:

• Chuck Purvis, Principal Transportation Planner, and Kearey Smith, GIS Coordinator, Metropolitan Transportation Commission, will discuss how MTC uses GIS and network analysis to support deep data analysis and develop the next generation of Bay Area travel behavior models.
• Tom Carden, Interaction Designer & Engineer, Stamen Design, will discuss the history, organization, and technical framework of Open Street Map, a community-based, public-domain, street centerline database development project.
• Oscar Jarquin, GIS Manager, California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), will discuss the development of GIS Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture to support a Linear Referencing System.

Abstracts & Biographies

Circles, Diamonds and StARS: Transit-Oriented Development, GIS, and Travel Behavior

MTC is responsible for planning, financing, and coordinating an immense transportation system covering nine counties and 101 cities, and which contains 620 miles of freeways, 518 miles of railways, 22 transit system operators and 24,760 transit stops.

GIS and network analysis techniques have added significant value to the MTC Year 2000 Bay Area Travel Survey (BATS2000). In support of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's Transit Oriented Development (TOD) policy, the StARS (Station Area Residents Study) study was undertaken to characterize the demographic and travel characteristics of station area residents — individuals living within close proximity to rail stations or ferry terminals in the region.

MTC also uses GIS to support the development of the next generation of Bay Area travel behavior models

Chuck Purvis is Principal Transportation Planner and head of the transportation analysis unit within the Metropolitan Transportation Commission Planning Section. Chuck has a B.A. in Geography from California State University, Northridge and a M.C.R.P. in City and Regional Planning from Rutgers University.
Kearey Smith is GIS Coordinator at MTC and oversees geographic analysis and GIS application development. Kearey has a B.S. in City and Regional Planning from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

All About Open Street Map

OpenStreetMap is a project aimed squarely at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.

Contributors to OpenStreetMap take handheld GPS devices with them on journeys, or go out specially to record GPS tracks. They record street names and other features using notebooks, digital cameras, and voice-recorders. Back at the computer, contributors upload those GPS logs showing where they travelled, and trace-out the roads on OpenStreetMap's collaborative database. Using their notes, contributors add the street names, information such as the type of road or path, and the connections between roads. That data is then processed to produce detailed street-level maps, which can be published freely on sites such as Wikipedia, used to create handheld or in-car navigation devices, or printed and copied without restriction.

Tom Carden is Interaction Designer and Engineer at Stamen Design, a design and technology studio. Before this, he wrote passenger flow simulation software for London-based architecture firm, YRM, and studied for his Masters in Virtual Environments, Imaging and Visualisation at University College London. He also has a Bachelor's degree in Artificial Intelligence with Mathematics from the University of Leeds.

Tom's computer science background has always been balanced with a strong interest in design and visual arts and he is actively involved in the community surrounding the Processing development environment. He was an early participant in OpenStreetMap, a project that aims to create free maps of the world using GPS and aerial photography, and his personal weblog Random Etc. has been a place for thoughts, sketches, interactive maps and visualisations since 2003.

GIS Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture

California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has an elaborate Linear Referencing System (LRS). In 2003, when ESRI released ArcGIS 8.0, Caltrans had to upgrade the custom dynamic segmentation (DynSeg) tools it had developed for ArcInfo and ArcView. Moreover, in 2002 the Department made the Office of GIS the focal point for all GIS activities in the Department and directed the Office to support engineering and land surveying functions. It became evident that Caltrans needed to upgrade its DynSeg capabilities for ArcGIS but also extend them to Computer Aided Drafting and Design (CADD), engineering design software, the Internet, and new tools such as Google Earth. In 2003, work commenced with the development of a new data model and four DynSeg web services to be consumed by ArcGIS, CADD, and other applications.

Initially, the DynSeg web services used ESRI's ArcObjects and accessed the route information through ArcSDE but over a couple of years the functionality was migrated to open source libraries or Oracle Spatial. The web services today use XML/GML to transfer data.

By having a vendor neutral GIS infrastructure individual business needs are open to a variety of solutions. About one third of GIS solutions are still ESRI but we also have Google Earth, GeoMedia, MicroStation, and even a more diverse selection on the web.

Oscar Jarquin is the Geographic Information System (GIS) manager for the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). Oscar is a licensed land surveyor, certified in Information Technology (IT) management, software development, and has worked as an Oracle database administrator and software developer.

Oscar enjoys technical challenges and developing solutions for his customers, but is most passionate about developing his and his team's management and leadership skills. The aspects of his work he enjoys the most are the strategic planning process and architecting enterprise infrastructure. Under his leadership, Caltrans implemented a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for the Department's linear referencing system in 2004. Most recently, his office implemented an asynchronous XML messaging service to display and serve real-time traveler information.