ITS Oregon

The ITS Oregon Steering Committee met on Friday, September 21st at TriMet in Southeast Portland. Thanks to Dave Crout for hosting! You can read the September ‘07 meeting minutes to find out what we talked about and various action items.

The next meeting will be on Friday, October 19th at 9am. Peter Koonce has offered to host this meeting at the offices of Kittelson Associates. Please browse the October ‘07 meeting agenda to see what we plan to discuss.

Coming soon: Let’s all wish Dean and Lisa good luck presenting our proposal to host the National Rural ITS Conference in 2009! Also, look forward to an announcement regarding the next ITS Oregon scholarship opportunity and information about the Northwest Transportation Conference, scheduled for February 5-7, 2008 at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

In case you haven’t seen it, Bernie Wagenblast maintains a daily digest of ITS news from around the country and around the world. His archive can be found at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/transport-communications

There were quite a few stories this month with local/regional relevance.

The Oregon covered the release of ODOT’s TripCheck Mobile. The Tacoma News-Tribune covered problems WDOT is having with video enforcement on the new Tacoma Narrows bridge. The same paper described an initial deployment of “Vehicle actuated traffic calming signs.” USDOT designated the length of I-5 as a “Corridor of the Future.” USA Today did a story about six states that are going to try experiments like Oregon’s with respect to mileage-based gas taxes and the technologies that the tests require.

Elsewhere, BART has demonstrated the effectiveness of real-time parking information in attracting drivers to transit. Also in California, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on the safety benefits of red light running cameras. Finally, the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach announced that RFID-based Truck Tags, used to manage truck access to Port facilities, will be required by December 1, 2007.

That’s it for September. I promise I’ll try to highlight something outside Pacific Time Zone next month!

The next ITS Oregon business meeting will be held on Friday, September 21st, 9-11am. TriMet will host the meeting at its Holgate Plaza office building. For more information, please contact Jon Makler.