The Infrastructure Show's Episodes
With Host Professor Joseph Schofer of Northwestern University.
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The quest for transportation data – knowing how people travel is key to infrastructure management, but how can this data be collected?
Posted July 25, 2011, Length: 22:31
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” is a commonly heard engineer’s truism. Yet many engineers who work in U.S. transportation unfortunately are faced with this dilemma on a regular basis. That is, they’re tasked with planning and managing infrastructure projects without having the detailed transportation data they need to make fully informed decisions. In this podcast, Professor Schofer shares with Tom the results of transportation and travel data studies he’s been involved with as part of a Transportation Research Board committee. The goal is to find ways to collect data on how people travel – whether by car, bus, train, truck, cycle or on foot; where they travel – the routes and localities; when they travel – what days, times of day; how often they travel; and why they travel. The challenge is to collect this information in ways that will be most accurate, but without seeming to intrude on people’s privacy.
The Infrastructure Show is sponsored by Northwestern University.
Descriptions of photos at top of page, from left to right:
Bayonne Bridge, from Bayonne, NJ to Staten Island, NY;
the Tom Moreland Interchange in Atlanta, GA;
Dworshak Dam, in Clearwater County, ID;
a transmission substation in Orem, UT.
All photos courtesy of Wikipedia.