Fortunately for bicyclists, public agencies are not only installing more bike trails, lanes, and shared use paths. Over the last few years many are also recognizing the need for support facilities and adding bike repair stations along these routes. The Fixit station shown in the photo above has an air pump to the left and a bike…
Real Time Weather Mapping with mPING
mPING, a real-time weather application, offers interactive insight into what is really going on with the weather in any location around the world. Users can access the app to either anonymously submit reports of current weather at their own location or view reports from others by downloading the app from iTunes or Google Play. All reports are shown through…
The World’s Most Costly Engineering Mistakes
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2017 National Engineers Week Educational Resources
An increasing number of STEM professionals have been flooding the market for the last decade, yet in the next ten years there will be a shortage of professionals in the field. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that from 2012 to 2022, STEM employment rates will grow by 13%, higher than the 11% projected…
3D Printing for Civil Engineers
Lately I've been thinking our field might be missing out by not exploring the opportunities offered by 3D printing. Even though 3D printers have been around for many years, I haven't seen anything significant related to its use by agencies or firms in our field. I remember a 3D printer in use in a classroom at the college…
Mapping the Accessible Path
The Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) team, a group out of the University of Washington, has been involved in an effort to improve mapping of the pedestrian way. By making use of the work from the OpenSidewalks project, they created AccessMap – a trip planning tool for people with limited mobility. With this tool, people can find the…
Who Should Pay for Clean Water?
There's been an ongoing legal dispute in Iowa between the Des Moines Water Works (DMWW) and drainage districts in three Iowa counties to decide who should pay the price to clean up polluted water. It's an interesting case for those of us who are involved in stormwater regulation and water treatment. And it is one…
Gamifying and Crowdsourcing ADA Inspections
The Makeability Lab at the University of Maryland is on a mission to "collect street-level accessibility information from every street in the world and enable design and development of a novel set of location-based technologies for accessibility." In order to achieve this goal, they set up an interactive website where people can inspect, identify, and…
Preparing Yourself and Your Organization for the Future!
Staying competitive in this time of rapidly changing technology is starting to look more challenging every year. Driverless cars, rapid-fire communications, drones, laser scanning, virtual and augmented reality, 3D visualizations – all just a spattering of the onslaught of technological advances our field has seen implemented over the last few years. And if we are to believe Moore's Law,…
Do you have a permit for that Pokemon?
About five years ago I wrote a blog post about augmented reality and the concerns a city might have over its potential impacts to a community (see Adding Augmented Reality to Your Zoning Ordinance). But I had not noticed the types of issues discussed in that post actually occuring until this week after the release of the incredibly popular Pokemon Go game….