Congrats on your retirement.

To all my CTPP friends and colleagues ���

I am busily cleaning up my office, and thought I���d take a break to send you a note to say ���Goodbye.���

FOR CTPP TECHNICAL SUPPORT, PLEASE CONTACT CTPPSUPPORT@CAMSYS.COM     OR CALL JJ ZANG AT 301-347-9130

I am happily headed toward my retirement, after 22.8 years with Federal Highway Administration, 9 years with the Puget Sound Regional Council, and 2 years with Los Angeles County. 

It has been fun to recollect some of the projects I���ve worked on both at PSRC and FHWA.  At FHWA, in particular, I pushed for more GIS at small and medium-sized MPOs and we used an add-on to ArcGIS for TAZ delineation for CTPP2000 in the mid-1990s.   The transportation community was a key supporter to retain the decennial census ���long form��� in the Census 2000.   It has been fun to guide the CTPP for the CTPP2000 and work with AASHTO on the 2006-2010  CTPP using ACS.   We have been leaders in developing e-learning systems and using webinars for training.

It has been nearly 20 years since the Lexington KY GPS study (1996), which used a Sony MagicLink hand-held computer and a Garmin GPS unit.  We had to pay over $200 for a 2 MB memory card!   That is NOT a typo ��� it was 2 MB,  NOT 2 GB.  We truncated the GPS points at the front end of the lat/long coordinates because we needed to save as much space as possible while collecting 1-sec GPS points. This was done when ���Selective Availability��� was still on.  https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/lextrav.pdf

Also, on the survey methods front, I worked on an SBIR project using web-based mapping for conducting a household travel survey in 1998. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/trb/rsgrpt.pdf    And most recently, worked again with the Madison County COG and RSG on a Smartphone app for a travel diary.

I hope you are aware of the Transportation Secure Data Center  www.nrel.gov/tsdc that I championed where we have been archiving GPS travel survey data from MPOs and State DOTs.

Some people have asked me what I plan to do, so I have included photos from a few quilts I have made. I plan to have a lot more time to sew, and also want to teach teenagers how to sew, in an after-school program.

See you at TRB annual meeting in January!

Elaine Murakami

FHWA Office of Planning

206-220-4460

I will be retiring on Sept 30, 2015

Home email  ermurakami@gmail.com