Hat tip to Clackamas County Chair (and fellow transportation wonk) Lynn Peterson, who passed on a pointer to this excellent video explaining what Intelligent Transportation Systems are all about.
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You may want to re-format something on this post. (Maybe it’s time for a site redesign, anyway.)
Hi Jeff — what formatting problem are you seeing? I’m currently looking at the front page and the post page with Firefox on a Mac, and don’t see any problems. Let me know what symptoms you see and what browser you’re using and I’ll check it out.
And yes, it is time for a redesign, thanks so much for volunteering. :-)
On Firefox 3.5.x running on Windows 7, the video widget was overlaying the right sidebar somewhat….
On second thought it might have been Vista (can’t remember which PC it was)–although the browser ought to behave similarly on both platforms…
I’m seeing the same thing on the home page. Don’t have a good fix for it in the short term.
No question we’re overdue for a redesign. Any volunteers? :-)
I do photography. My website is on my name above my post and pubic transportation is a speciality!
I’ve just updated the YouTube embed to use a smaller size.
Well this is rather humilitaing…you all know i meant to say ‘public transportation’, right?
Cameron — I’ll just make the inevitable reference to “boarding rides” before anyone else does — and just leave it at that and hope everyone else just gets back to the topic of Intelligent Transportation Systems.
Its OK, Cameron. Even the mayor gets confused.
(Ba-da-BOOM!)
@EngineerScotty: Windows, eh? Maybe it’s time to switch to an Intelligent Computing System?
http://ozguru.mu.nu/Photos/2005-11-11–Dilbert_Unix.jpg
By the by, I’m using Chrome on a Mac and it looks just fine.
I use Linux quite a bit, actually- (and prefer it). The Windoze machine in question is my wife’s laptop. :)
i couldn’t even get through the whole video. we don’t need more tricks and tech to show us how to find parking or better routes to get to our destination… those are band-aids on the problem. what we need is fewer cars on the road!
That’s part of the promise of ITS: the less time people spending driving around looking for parking/etc means lower VMT & VHT. The net effect is fewer cars on the road.
The video did a good job of showing how ITS might help by providing real-time information to travelers so they can make better decisions. It didn’t do such of a good job of showing how this will actually happen.
It didn’t do such of a good job of showing how this will actually happen.
Probably because IBM AU/NZ, the vendor and systems integrator who published this video, would just _love_ to chat with policymakers about how IBM thinks this will happen, and just what IBM products/services it will take to make it happen. :-)
The first thing that occurs to me about “smart” transportation is to get government to time the friggen lights so the traffic can flow!
When I was exposed to ITS, it was a federal program generating lots of documentation and trying to set standards (probably prematurely), while local agencies & DOTs were Just Doing It. I’m not in that loop now – does anyone know if the federal program is producing anything useful? (Now we have RITA: http://www.rita.dot.gov/about_rita/)
There is a regional ITS group that includes a lot of people from city, state and Metro. Federal contributions are funding a number of regional projects.