Tag: Department of transportation

How Tuesdays Election is Going to Affect the Transportation Sector

loadsmartLeave a comment

10 New Governors were elected, with half of those coming from opposing political parties than before. Republicans net gained three governors and took control of the senate. Now what does this mean for us?

-Congress has been under pressure for awhile to produce a LONG TERM transportation bill. Something that has been unsuccessful since 2009. The current bill funds the states transportation until May 2015, which is a problem since states rely on federal funding for more then 50% of their transportation money. Here is a broad list of what is being developed.

New State Transportation Money

States really working on it: Texas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan.

Federal Surface Transportation Money

The reason congress hasn’t been able to figure out of a long term bill for transportation is that neither congress or Obama want to raise the gas tax, which has not been raised since 1993. With the republican in control of congress that won’t change, but the positive, Republican are going to have to work hard to prove themselves.

Public Transit

The good news first, 70% of voters approve of the current local public transits. Atlanta plans to expand MARTA and both Seattle and San Francisco have voted for measures to support public transit.

The bad news, Florida voters voted against tax increase to support transit. Baltimore and Washington DC might be having some issues with the surprising win of Republican Larry Hogan for Governor of Maryland, who stated he wanted to cancel both the Baltimore Red Line and Washington DC purple line projects. (Both projects have been worked on for years)

For more specific details for to Governing>>

No privacy, DOT preparing for all the data coming in loads

loadsmartLeave a comment

Lets face it, our lives are very public. All of our lives are collected for data, from what we look for online, our conversations and our location. In the past, location was less of a factor in data but now with means of travel becoming more and more technological (connections with GPS, chevy adding Wi-fi to cars, E-Z pass, and e-logging) connections are bringing in a ridiculous amount of data, and with technology growing exponentially, the growth is insurmountable to past data collection and we are not prepare for it. Quality is more important then quantity and finding the useful data will become harder. To start preparing for it the department of transportation has hired its first chief data officer Dan Morgan who in just three months has already started measuring data quality and building a web data service to access the data easily. The department of transportation, in collaborating with Dan Morgan, is working on giving data collectors (mainly states) the correct tools to gather data in this grand information age. However making people try something new has been a challenge. The next discussion according to the chief data officer is asking the tough questions: What to exchange, how to store it and what does it mean? As well as how to retain that content over long periods of time. FedScoop>>