2011 GIS in Public Transportation Conference Details Announced

URISA and the University of South Florida’s National Center for Transit Research at the Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR) are pleased to announce the details of the 2011 GIS in Public Transportation Conference, which will take place at the Hilton Bayfront in St. Petersburg, Florida, September 13-15, 2011.

URISA Certified Workshops will open the conference on Tuesday, September 13. Attendees may choose to attend Asset Management: Planning, Strategy, and Implementation or GIS Program Management.

Two keynote speakers will be featured at the conference:

• Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America – presented by Adie Tomer, Metropolitan Policy Program, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC

• Open Trip Planner: Open Source Multimodal Trip Planner – presented by Kevin Webb, Project and Product Manager for Trip Planning and System Maps, OpenPlans Transportation

The conference was developed primarily from submissions received through the Call for Abstracts. Some of the featured sessions include:

Tools and Techniques - This session will cover use of GIS technology tools to improve system performance.

• GIS for Better Operational Performance and Service Delivery - GeoTransit Planner 
  Colleen Schelde and Jakob Mortensen, GeoManagement A/S, Charlottenlund, Denmark
• Linear Referencing System in Transit Agency
  Voliya Arakkal, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), Washington DC
• Model Builder™, Marketing, and Money 
  Shannon Haney, Hillsborough Area Regional Transit, Tampa, FL

Real Time – Learn about some of the latest applications of real time transit data, from information accessibility to the development and deployment of web-based transit data.

• Transit 2.0: Info-accessibility in Urban Transport
  Ian White, Urban Mapping, San Francisco, CA
• The Art and Science of Designing and Deploying Web-Based Real-Time Customer Information
  Lawrence Harman and Uma Shama, PhD, Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, MA
• GIS Data in Real Time Transit Management Systems
  Joachim Pfeiffer,  Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., San Francisco, CA

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) - Speakers in this session will present research in BRT impacts on property value, transit accessibility, and the role of GIS in identifying BRT corridors.

• Land Use Impacts of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT): The Boston Silver Line
  Victoria Perk and Steven Reader, Ph.D., Center for Urban Transportation Research, Tampa, FL
• Identification of Bus Rapid Transit Corridor in a GIS Environment
  Vimal Kr. Gahlot, Research Scholar, MNIT, Jaipur, India 
• BRT's Impact on Transit Accessibility
  Cheryl Thole,  Center for Urban Transportation Research , Tampa, FL

A poster session (still accepting submissions), exhibition and networking events round out the conference experience. Registration and hotel discounts are available through the end of August. For complete conference, exhibits, travel and registration information, visit http://www.urisa.org/gis_transit today!