 pnh102Reptiles Are Cuddly And PrettyPremium join:2002-05-02 Mount Airy, MD | reply to marigolds
Re: More Proof that Municipal Internet Bans are Needed said by marigolds:Well, since my field is GIS and I know the twin cities are leaders in municipal GIS... I imagine office to office terabyte imagery transfers for the parcel fabric would be a start. I see what you're saying but on the flip side, say that the twin cities cannot currently do this because they lack this network. I could agree with the idea if the Twin Cities needed to be able to do what you say in order to provide a vital city service to the people who live there. But if the people are getting by just fine without it, it makes it harder to justify the spending.
said by marigolds:Also very useful for disaster response and public safety when prepping mobile units (ideally weekly refreshes of ~300GB of data, but realistically most cities right now are only refreshing every 2 years and using dispatchers to fill in the gaps). Hmmm... if this bleeding edge technology I don't think relying on it for disaster response is the best of ideas. Although this is a bit of a segue, we saw what happened to 911 service in New England when FairPoint decided to change out the existing, working technology for something new. It was a disaster. -- This isn't fair! I was only supposed to hate just ONE presidential candidate! |
 marigoldsGainfully employed, finallyPremium,MVM join:2002-05-13 Saint Louis, MO kudos:1 | It's a well established technology for disaster response in Japan (in particular for earthquake response). Japan is really the bleeding edge where they are using a dedicated ultra broadband satellite for emergency response. In the U.S., we basically have to send out units blind and normally get up to date imagery 2-6 weeks after the disaster incident, if that. Mobile units basically go out for field assessment with old data because there is not enough bandwidth to update them regularly. In other words, there is no existing working technology in this area in the United States.
Similarly for the parcel fabric idea... what cities basically do now is spend several hundred thousand a year ($5-10 per parcel) to do the data updates not including data acquisition and salaries. Yes, people get by without it, but the cost expenditure is easily in the millions per year for a city the size of Minneapolis. Adding in the bandwidth can allow the shift towards stronger use of lidar and aerial imagery for assessment and cadastrel resulting in a very significant drop in annual costs. On top of that, it would allow citizens to get routine free access to that data. Right now that data is free for some areas (like St Louis County) while I have seen some cities charge seven figures for that data (essentially closing all access outside of the city office). The service is there, but it is only available to major title companies. -- ISCABBS - the oldest and largest BBS on the Internet telnet://bbs.iscabbs.com Professional Geographer Geographic Information Science researcher |