MTC Sustainable Communities Strategies

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission is undertaking Sustainable Communities Strategies planning to support reducing greenhouse gas emissions resulting from vehicle travel, by coordinating land use and transportation policies. To assist in this project, they have approved a project with UC Berkeley, in cooperation with Purdue University, to develop a visualization capability to support a public outreach process.

• Paul Waddell is the Principal Investigator, with collaborators Daniel Aliaga and Bedrich Benes, Purdue University.

• The project is scheduled to begin in January of 2011, and to go 'live' in the outreach process in the Fall of 2011.

• The system will include:
  • Modeling of 3D terrain, local streets, parcels and buildings
  • Visualization of alternative building types, mixtures and densities
  • Visualization of vehicles, pedestrians, vegetation and sky illumination
  • Multi-touch user interfaces for large-format displays
  • Scenario building capabilities to edit development constraints and other inputs to scenarios

The system will involve developing an open source platform that draws on UrbanSim and OPUS, and builds on preliminary 3D visualization work done by the collaborators on this project.

Note: we are currently recruiting students at Berkeley for this and related projects.

More details will be posted here soon.

-- PaulWaddell - 17 Nov 2010