I attended the first day of the Transportation Research Board’s 94th annual meeting. How is that for a conference with a track record? There are 12,000 people here at the Washington, DC conference center to discuss every aspect of transportation that you can imagine.
I was in the 3D data sessions and although we are still very early in the process the direction is clear – the DOT’s will be moving from a project centric business model to a lifecycle asset management approach. This will require a lot of data collection and mobile lidar will be the method of choice.
There is a lot of work to do after the data is collected, but key people are becoming aware of the need for an integrated, unified transportation data model.
