Elaine, good stuff. Wish only the best!
To all my CTPP friends and colleagues –
I am busily cleaning up my office, and thought I’d take a break to send you a note to say “Goodbye.”
FOR CTPP TECHNICAL SUPPORT, PLEASE CONTACT
CTPPSUPPORT@CAMSYS.COM OR CALL JJ ZANG AT 301-347-9130
I am happily headed toward my retirement, after 22.8 years with Federal Highway Administration, 9 years with the Puget Sound Regional Council, and 2 years with Los Angeles County.
It has been fun to recollect some of the projects I’ve worked on both at PSRC and FHWA. At FHWA, in particular, I pushed for more GIS at small and medium-sized MPOs and we used an add-on to ArcGIS for TAZ delineation for CTPP2000 in the
mid-1990s. The transportation community was a key supporter to retain the decennial census “long form” in the Census 2000. It has been fun to guide the CTPP for the CTPP2000 and work with AASHTO on the 2006-2010 CTPP using ACS. We have been leaders
in developing e-learning systems and using webinars for training.
It has been nearly 20 years since the Lexington KY GPS study (1996), which used a Sony MagicLink hand-held computer and a Garmin GPS unit. We had to pay over $200 for a 2 MB memory card! That is NOT a typo – it was 2 MB, NOT 2 GB.
We truncated the GPS points at the front end of the lat/long coordinates because we needed to save as much space as possible while collecting 1-sec GPS points. This was done when “Selective Availability” was still on.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/lextrav.pdf
Also, on the survey methods front, I worked on an SBIR project using web-based mapping for conducting a household travel survey in 1998.
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/trb/rsgrpt.pdf And most recently, worked again with the Madison County COG and RSG on a Smartphone app for a travel diary.
I hope you are aware of the Transportation Secure Data Center
www.nrel.gov/tsdc that I championed where we have been archiving GPS travel survey data from MPOs and State DOTs.
Some people have asked me what I plan to do, so I have included photos from a few quilts I have made. I plan to have a lot more time to sew, and also want to teach teenagers how to sew, in an after-school program.
See you at TRB annual meeting in January!
Elaine Murakami
FHWA Office of Planning
206-220-4460
I will be retiring on Sept 30, 2015
Home email ermurakami@gmail.com