Project improves mapping

If you see a truck full of video cameras taking pictures of your neighborhood, don't worry.

It's just part of a county project to help plan and better set up global-positioning coordinates.

"In a nutshell, it's a fancy truck that takes video from several different places on the side of the truck of every street in the county," said Marilyn Heuer, a county project administrator. "It takes pictures of the right-of-ways, shows all the signs painted on the road and stop signs or any signage in the right-of-way. Sewers, fire hydrants, that kind of thing. So if we try to do planning or create an intersection we'll have a visual picture of that intersection."

The GeoSpan Corp. uses computerized video technology to videotape county roads while establishing global positioning system coordinates for each location.

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"The company's technology enables the creation of visual geographic information consisting of spatially indexed movies of city streets and state highways, accurate maps, and geographic position of all images," according to the GeoSpan web site.

The project is carried out by a specially designed van with eight cameras mounted around it, taking video of nearly every conceivable angle as the van drives down the more than 600 miles of county roads.

Officials say the advantages of the project include identifying existing problems, creating more accurate maps, improving emergency response times, cutting costs and saving time.

"They're doing a geographical positioning system data collection for our centerline roads and right-of-way and all of our signage. Then they're also doing a video of those assets so that we can use that information to design roads, respond to complaints and other things without actually having to go out to those locations every time," said county Construction and Maintenance Services Director Kevin Lear.

Lear said the first phase of the project, marking certain roads and bridges, in nearly complete. The county approved $41,570 to begin the final stage of a project that Lear said will make life easier.

"It's going to benefit us in time and resources that we would otherwise have to put toward any kind of problem or program that we have coming up," he said, "whether it's designing a new road, or responding to complaints, or any kind of thing that deals with rural areas."