(Source:  EnterpriseNews.com)

For more than a year, Gov. Deval Patrick has been promising a response to the state’s ever-worsening transportation woes. Friday he delivered a proposal that includes most of what the situation requires.

Patrick starts with reform, as he should. His plan would finally put the much-despised Mass. Turnpike Authority out of business, merging it, along with the MBTA, MassPort and the Registry of Motor Vehicles, into a single, more accountable, transportation agency.

Patrick also vows to do away with the administrative redundancy and unjustifiable perks that have grown over the decades in these transportation fiefdoms. The MBTA contract, for instance, allows union workers to retire after just 23 years on the job and immediately begin collecting healthy pensions, with the state providing health insurance for the rest of their lives. With the “T” burdened by more than $5 billion in debt, such excesses are inexcusable.

(Source:  Gizmodo.com)

The bridge built to replace the one that crumbled like delicious goat cheese in Minneapolis in 2007—is a smartie, packed with built-in sensors that perform wonders like automagically de-ice the road in winter.

Less than one percent of the cost of the St. Anthony Falls bridge was spent on the sensor system, which tracks weather, stresses and even traffic, and it’ll save money in the long run, with its automatic de-icing system cutting “weather management” costs by 10 to 50 percent. It’s the incorporation of the smart sensor tech that actually won the contract to build the bridge for the FIGG team. The next step will be wireless sensors that are even cheaper, so it’ll be loaded up with thousands of them, not hundreds.

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