Topographic Map Digitizing & Active Transportation Research

Internship • Summer & Fall 2023

Geospatial Data Analysis Work

Context

My biggest and most self-guided project was a geospatial data project for the FAA. The FAA is constantly tracking their progress cleaning up old airway infrastructure, especially sites that once had fuel storage tanks. One of the oldest types of airway infrastructure is airway beacons, light towers built in corridors over a century ago to guide pilots from one airport to another. The FAA has a dataset of all known historical airway beacon locations, but the evidence often conflicted or was inaccurate due to the low resolution of previously digitized maps.

My Work

One untapped source of airway beacon evidence was historical USGS topographic maps. If beacon evidence was found at the location of another map point, that point could be considered verified. The challenge was to automate a process for downloading the maps, quickly identify beacons among a sea of other details, and record the coordinates in the dataset.

I achieved this using Python by (1) downloading the topo maps available at each known location using the USGS Sciencebase API, (2) cropping each map using a geospatial raster package, (3) running a character recognition machine learning package (easyOCR) to detect and highlight the word “Beacon”, and (4) coding a simple UI to quickly flip through each map and record correctly identified evidence.

Result

In the end, I downloaded and processed over 13,000 maps, found 1,251 new pieces of beacon location evidence, and verified the locations of 854 beacons nationwide.

Skills

Python, Geospatial Data, Machine Learning Implementation

Bike and Pedestrian Work

Context

The two biggest bike-ped projects I got to work on were sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). The first was developing the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for the Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program (ATIIP), a new grant program funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The second was a research review of academic papers written in the last year related to bike and pedestrian mobility, a component of a Strategic Agenda for the FHWA.

My Work

For the ATIIP NOFO, I created from scratch the frequently asked questions document and developed various other sections of the NOFO document itself by researching how other similar grant applications were designed. For the research review, I read 108 papers and drafted a summary of shared themes, important findings, and research gaps across the categories of safety, equity, networks, and trips.

Result

I created a four-page summary of the 108 most recent bike and pedestrian papers, which was included in the FHWA Bikeped Strategic Agenda and passed up the chain of command. The ATIIP NOFO, which I made small contibutions to, is scheduled to be released to the public in March 2024.

Skills

Grant Design, Research Reviewing