- Joe Bima has provided information on the level of funds committed by state DOT.
- Mobile data acquisition may be the only hope for some of the DOTs to get their projects started, or lose the money.
- Bill Gutelius pointed me to ClearEdge 3D who claims to be able to automatically extract a 3D CAD model from a terrestrial laser scan.
I received a very interesting response to yesterday’s Recovery post from Joe Bima at GeoCue. Joe tracks the DOT market here in the US. Turns out that of the $27 billion in stimulus funding provided to the DOTs that only 46% has been obligated. The interesting twist involving this funding is that the individual states only have until the end of the month to obligate the money, or risk losing it to other states because they are required to release their funding after the deadline.
Some of the states that have obligated less than 25% of their allotted funds to date include Georgia, Massachusetts and the state of Washington. Wyoming and Utah are the leaders with 98% and 87%, respectively committed.
As Joe points out with the deadline looming, the states that need to pull a rabbit out of their hats might want to consider a mobile mapping data acquisition strategy to help jump start their projects. It is rather amazing to me that given the importance of these projects, that these states can be so far behind.
While on the subject of feedback, Bill Gutelius, a loyal reader from Active Imaging Systems pointed me to 2 follow up locations. The first concerns FLASH Lidar, which I will defer to a separate post, and ClearEdge 3D. The latter claims to have patent pending technology to automatically extract editable CAD models from terrestrial laser scanned data. This falls under the automated feature extraction category, which as discussed is the search for the holy grail. It’s definitely worth a more detailed look.
Thanks to Bill and Joe for the feedback.
A friend of mine works for a DOT (glad to see not one of the ones listed as ‘behind’) and he’s in charge of the laser scanning they conduct. I recently discussed with him, out of pure curiosity, his thoughts on mobile scanning. He said the vertical error was too high for his use because over miles and miles of freeway, the error adds up to a LOT of wasted money should they be laying half an inch too-much pavement. But he was going to keep a very close eye on it for improvements. I was just wondering if there are any other DOT readers (or any readers, actually) out there with similar concerns or who felt the exact opposite?