Category Archives: Civil/Transportation
The Future of Autonomous Transport
Geospatial technologies play a pivotal role for the Transport Systems Catapult, the UK’s not-for-profit innovation center for intelligent mobility. The town of Milton Keynes is at the heart of the UK’s transport revolution. It’s home to several tech start-ups and major transport-related brands, such as Network Rail (the UK’s rail authority), Leica Geosystems, Mercedes, VW,...
Over Roads and Quarries
A surveyor with a construction company in Northern Ireland uses UAVs to develop highway construction and for adjoining quarry quantities. Improving infrastructure has become crucial to local and global economies due to increased strain on roads and public transport from a rising population. When GRAHAM Construction and its partner, Farrans, were jointly awarded the contract...
Taxi!
Major work on JFK airport’s system of taxiways gets a boost from a contractor’s 3D milling capability. Ranked #16 on the list of the world’s busiest airports, New York’s JFK airport handles nearly 59 million passengers and 1.4 million tons of cargo annually. The area designated for warehouse and storage facilities to accommodate all that...
Mexico City’s Transportation Revolution
Using drones, lidar, and BIM, enterprising surveyors and geospatial engineers designed and constructed the city’s first high-speed train system. Editor’s Note: Lessons learned from a problematic rail project in Mexico City prompted an initiative to pull out all technological stops for a subsequent new rail line. An innovative, tech-savvy firm that had demonstrated its capabilities...
AIS: Using Shipping Data in GIS
We’ve all been dazzled by those awesome maps that animate ships or aircraft using AIS, as they move in near real time, but how do they work? What magic sits beneath the hood? As luck would have it, whilst working with the offshore wind farm industry I had to do a lot of vessel analysis,...
Night in the Afternoon: A US Solar Eclipse
What you need to know about the 2017 solar eclipse The upcoming solar eclipse will leave a 70-mile-wide trail of darkness across the United States on August 21, 2017 (see the map of the eclipse path on pages 44-45). This will be a once-in-a-lifetime event for many people. While another total solar eclipse will make...
