For the past few years, Solar Roadways has been working on developing solar panels as surface materials for roadways. Today the company posted the video below on their Facebook page. In it Scott Brusaw summarizes their work to date and looks ahead to the future. In the past, the company seemed to primarily focus on roads, but based on the video,…
Tag: transportation
Street Bump – useful but not ready for prime time engineering
Today I tried out Street Bump – a mobile application designed and developed by Connected Bits, LLC and produced by the Mayor's office of Boston. This application, available for the iPhone, picks up bumps in the road as people drive along a street with their phone. Because smoothness or "the ride" is one component we…
Sharing the Road in 1906
The other day I saw a link posted for one of the most interesting transportation videos I have ever seen. It is about an 11-minute video of a trip down Market Street in San Francisco in 1906 before the fire/earthquake. From what I have read about it, someone filmed it with a camera placed in…
Kinect, Robotics, Highway Safety, and Saving Lives
There's been a lot of talk about the use of Kinect and robotics. Yes, people have figured out how to use Microsoft's awesome gadget to manipulate robots. And Microsoft even has a Robotics website and development toolkits for this purpose. But so far, most of the demos I have seen focus on using robots…
House Transportation Bill: The Only Logical Solution
I work at the bottom of the transportation food chain. At this level, we have some very basic needs. Each year, we need to fix roads, and we need to find the money to do so. And for the first time in my career, Congress seems to be considering a transportation bill that might…
Is the ASCE Infrastructure Report Card Really a Good Idea?
As a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), I regularly receive information and notices proclaiming their annual "grading" of our nation's infrastructure. There is even a website to promote this effort: http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/. My opinion on this might not be popular with my colleagues, but frankly I have never thought this report was…
Driverless vehicles – It’s Only a Matter of Time
This month, Google received Patent No. 8078349 for "Transitioning a Mixed-Mode Vehicle to Autonomous Mode." The vehicle appears to be able to function in a driver-controlled mode, yet has the ability to be placed in a "driver-less" mode. When placed in this mode, the vehicle will use non-human inputs to monitor its location and proceed…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 30
Day 30 Jury Duty Not sure if anyone realized I never uploaded an article yesterday, but I didn't post because I was called for jury duty. So I had to take the day off to go to that. It was interesting – I got as far as being questioned as a possible juror, but the…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 22
Day 22 Parking Lot Planning This morning a couple of us discussed the parking lot we are planning to build in our downtown. The project engineer for the job submitted the necessary documents to our planning department for the planning commission hearing we will have Sept. 8th. I also talked to a landscaper who will…