Hello, and welcome to this Infrastructure-themed GeoSpatial Stream. I’m your host, Todd Danielson, and today’s Lead Sponsor is Esri’s Geodesign Summit.

Today’s Top Story is Road Maintenance. An article on World Highways notes that a road-maintenance crisis is deepening in many parts of the world, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States.

For UK examples: Leeds faces a bill of $153 million dollars just to repair potholes, Islington needs to come up with $119 million dollars, and UK’s Asphalt Industry Alliance claims that England needs $18 billion dollars to handle road maintenance.

And if that sounds like a lot of money, how about this? U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders is the latest to point to the oft-cited report from the American Society of Civil Engineers stating that the United States needs more than $1.7 TRILLION dollars just to improve roads, bridges and transit. Yes, that’s trillion, a word normally reserved for astrophysicists.

Sanders is introducing legislation to authorize a $1 trillion dollar—there’s that word again—multi-year program for such needed improvements. And to show just how dire the infrastructure situation is here in the states, there might actually be bi-partisan legislative support for the spending.

The bills for road maintenance have been pushed down the road for a long time, but we seem to be approaching the breaking point, often literally. Stay tuned to see how these financial proposals develop. This could be very big news.

That was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this brief message.

Here’s some government infrastructure spending that’s actually happening. The U.S. Department of Transportation is providing $30 million dollars in state grants for programs designed to strengthen commercial vehicle safety via real-time data tools and intelligent transportation systems.

And MIT spinout Essess is introducing “drive by” heat mapping to help increase energy efficiency in homes and businesses. The startup deploys cars with thermal-imaging rooftop rigs that create heat maps of thousands of buildings per hour, detecting fixable heat leaks.

In industry headlines, the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation added Fayetteville State University and the University of South Carolina to its list of accredited GEOINT programs.

BJ’s Wholesale Club adopted Esri’s location-analytics solutions to aid in real-estate research strategy and business-insight analysis.

Innovyze released InfoWater version 11.5, featuring the Pump System Analyst extension suite and direct SCADA connectivity.

And FARO introduced its FARO Freestyle3D Handheld Laser Scanner, which is equipped with a Microsoft Surface tablet to allow users to view point cloud data as they’re captured.

Next week I’ll be in Redlands, California, at Esri headquarters for its latest Geodesign Summit. So for today’s Final Thought and to share some of the geode sign spirit, here’s a clip from a video I made based on last year’s summit.

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I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.