McGurrin Consulting

Last month I had the opportunity to give a presentation on the 66 Tolls skill that I’ve developed for Alexa at the local Transportation Techies meetup. There were a number of excellent presentations, and Arlington’s Mobility Lab has published a good write-up on all the presentations. I recommend the Transportation Techies meet-ups for anyone in […]

“There’s no future that doesn’t have ambient computing or voice activation… none.” Mark Cuban. Open data and voice interfaces will both have growing roles in transportation. As a consultant in the ITS field, I’ve always felt that there was great value in understanding multiple perspectives, from a high level down through implementation. With that in […]

One of my current projects is working with ICF and the EDR Group to calculate the infrastructure, vehicle, and user costs of multiple potential deployment scenarios for connected and autonomous vehicles. My role is as a subject matter expert on connected and automated vehicles, In addition to producing the cost estimates, we are developing an automated tool […]

As the TRB Freeway Ops Committe states, “The Freeway Management and Operations Handbook (FMOH) provides an overview of the institutional and technical issues associated with the operation of a freeway network. The FMOH provides an overview of the potential strategies, tools, and technologies that may be used to support the management and operation or be […]

There is an ongoing and intensifying debate between advocates of deploying Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) as the radio medium for vehicle to vehicle safety communications and those who advocate using a newly-emerging cellular technology, Cellular V2X (C-V2X) as the radio medium for such communications. One of the factors involved is timing. DSRC has been extensively tested, […]

The FHWA had published their first guide on applying agile techniques to ITS projects, Applying Scrum Methods to ITS Projects.  To quote from the document’s abstract, ” The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) developed this document to help those interested in learning about Scrum Methods, one of the Agile Methodologies, and how to incorporate Scrum into ITS project […]

Arthur C. Clarke wrote that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” For non-experts, that certainly seems to be the case for self-driving cars. But as in the case of magic tricks, we can begin to understand how self-driving cars work by breaking them down into component pieces and examining them individually. If you […]

A while back, I worked with two of my colleagues (Greg Hatcher and Carolina Burnier, both of Noblis) to write an article for Thinking Highways magazine on the past 10 years of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) developments in the U.S. In developing that article, it occurred to me that at the risk of oversimplification, one […]

I’m looking forward to once again teaching the online, instructor led Connected Vehicle 101 course for CITE, starting next week. It provides a good introduction to connected vehicle technologies and applications, as well as the current status of USDOT-funded field tests and pilot deployments. The “blended” online format provides opportunities to teleconference with fellow students […]

Introduction The Accessibility Observatory at the University of Minnesota is one of, if not the, leading center for the research and application of accessibility-based transportation system evaluation. They have harnessed the growth of big data in transportation, along with cloud computing resources, to conduct multiple groundbreaking accessibility studies that are unprecedented in scope. As part […]

The announcement by Uber that they will provide free time of day travel time data could be a game-changer for free and open routing and planning tools, such as Valhalla and Mapzen’s isochrone tool.  These tools use GTFS schedule data as a decent surrogate for transit travel times, and calculate walk and bike times, but […]

Back in 2013, I authored an article on the value of accessibility, aka access to destinations, as a transportation performance metric. Accessibility basically measures the ability to access jobs, goods, or services in a community. While there are many formulations, a simple accessibility metric would be the number of jobs reachable by a 30 minute […]

There is considerable discussion and debate concerning the relationships between connected vehicle and automated vehicle technology. In an article from the fall 2015 edition of Thinking Highways magazine, I describe the results from a study of the interrelationships. A key take-away is that the two technologies have, in many ways, a synergistic relationship. Connectivity literally […]

The theme of the October 2015 issue of Thinking Highways magazine is data, and it includes a think piece I authored on open traffic data. In the few short weeks after I wrote the piece, there were a couple of interesting announcements on the topic. While not open to other parties, TomTom is partnering with […]

A significant portion of my work has been at the intersection of technical and policy issues. An example is my work on open data and open source policies for the USDOT’s ITS program. One artifact from that work is the Software Licensing Policy for the Open Source Application Development Portal (OSADP)

While at Noblis, my colleagues and I conducted two “Horizon Scans,” identifying and assessing the technical, institutional, commercial, and environmental trends that might positively or negatively affect ITS deployment over the long term. The purpose of the studies were to help the ITS JPO understand the range of opportunities and threats that may warrant further […]

Several images on the website are used under a Creative Commons license. These are: SeattleI5Skyline by Cacophony, used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Linear City-Scape from Gweb, used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Santiago de Chile de noche by Javmoraga, used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.