UPDATE: Friday, July 16th, 2010
Because members of the Western States Rural Transportation Consortium come from four different states, the Western States Forum provided a convenient time and location for an informal meeting. Ian Turnbull and Sean Campbell from Caltrans, Ted Bailey from Washington State DOT (WSDOT), Jon Dickinson from Nevada DOT, and David Veneziano and Doug Galarus from WTI, met during the Forum to discuss the status of the Consortium charter documents, budget, and the Consortium pooled fund. The Charter and Pooled Fund documents are being finalized and are expected to be completed soon. A number of potential activities and projects were also discussed and several ideas were highlighted for future Consortium directions.
One area of interest for the Consortium is the application of Bluetooth technologies to rural travel time observation. A Bluetooth working group has been established and is actively sharing information about projects being conducted in the member states. During the Western States Forum, the University of Washington (UW) and WSDOT presented their research on using Bluetooth MAC address matching for travel times. You can review the complete presentation on the Western States Forum website.
Here is Yegor Malinovskiy from the University of Washington explaining potential applications of Bluetooth technologies. The devices on the chairs (front and back) are Bluetooth sensors used for travel time data collection and were built by UW.
Photo by Doug Galarus