City plots future using 3-D scans

Gear details U.S. 76 area for projects in Branson

Kyle Madrid, survey field chief with CFS Engineering sets up a LiDAR scanner in Branson, Mo. on Friday, March 21.  The city is using the technology to map its vital U.S. Highway 76 corridor. Photo by John Magsam
Kyle Madrid, survey field chief with CFS Engineering sets up a LiDAR scanner in Branson, Mo. on Friday, March 21. The city is using the technology to map its vital U.S. Highway 76 corridor. Photo by John Magsam

Correction: The city of Branson is planning to revitalize five miles along Missouri 76. This article incorrectly identified the highway.

BRANSON - The main drag through the tourist town of Branson is being scanned with invisible rays.

Beams are bouncing along U.S. 76 to map the roadway that’s the home to Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede, the Hollywood Wax Museum with its gigantic King Kong leaning over traffic, the Titanic Museum Attraction ocean liner facade seemingly about to knife across the roadway, and hundreds of other closely packed shops, restaurants, theaters and attractions.

The city is mapping this vital corridor using LiDAR, also known as light detection and ranging, as part of the planning process. The system uses laser pulses to gather three-dimensional structural information from millions of data points. The information will be used to get vital details about thecluttered roadway.

Branson is a city that thrives on tourism and tourists flock to U.S. 76. The often-jammed roadway is a peril to pedestrians, and is marred by looming power lines, so a revitalization project is underway.

The information gathered won’t only be used for simple mapping, said Sabin Yanez, senior vice president with Cook, Flatt and Strobel Engineers, which has Missouri offices in Kanasas City, Springfield and Branson. He said the system will provide the data, including three-dimensional photography, to formulate a real vision of what the roadway could look like in the future.Perhaps even more importantly, the system gives the company the ability to communicate that vision to all the businesses and city residents it will affect.

“This system makes it much easier to show the data,” Yanez said.

The New Spirit of 76 revitalization plan targets 5 miles of U.S. 76 starting just east of U.S. 65. It’s expected to cost $80 million to transform the roadway over four to six years.

The redesign includes plans for promenades, lighting, landscaping, gathering points, removal of utility poles and lines, and dealing with traffic congestion. The project’s goal is to create a corridor that will help retail and entertainment venues along the roadway, promote more private investment and efficiently move travelers to their destinations.

Yanez said of the 5-mile stretch of road there are nearly 3 miles that are either driveways, curb-cuts or intersections. He said a project goal is to eliminate a mile’s worth of those features. The city is paying just shy of $100,000 for the mapping services.

Cook, Flatt and Strobel Engineers, purchased a truck-mounted LiDAR system recently and had one of its employees trained to use the system, in part, to support its Branson project. Yanez said the new gear also will be used on other contracts, particularly those serving railroads and the state highway departments, which favor surveys using the system.

“LiDAR was becoming more important to our clients,” Yanez said.

Malcolm Williamson, research associate at the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, said the technology, commonly called highdensity surveying, can virtually measure everything a device can “see” up to its range limit. He said the stored information is a treasure trove of data, that can be accessed later if plans change or different measurements are needed.

He said the technology is becoming more common but its still expensive, so it’s used primarily by larger surveying companies and engineering operations, like Cook, Flatt and Strobel..

Curtis Sumner, executive director of the National Society of Professional Surveyors, said use of the system is becoming more popular around the courtry, with aerial units used to map large expanses of territory and with ground units used most often in corridor mapping. As opposed to conventional surveying, which is somewhat limited in scope, the systems not only offer information about the ground but what’s on it, from trees, buildings, signs and above-ground utilities, he said.

“It just picks up everything,” he said.

Williamson said LiDAR began to be used for mapping, primarily from aircraft in the mid-1990s, but advances allowing it to perform 360-degree scans made ground units feasible starting around 2000. Devices went from emitting about 2,000 laser pulses when the technology was first used to 1 million today.

He said combined with 3-D photography, high-density surveying allows highly accurate visual records and the ability to make computer models that show how changes will look, right down to the proper colors.

So far, the main 5 miles of U.S. 76 have been scanned, which took about a month. Several days of surveying were lost because of poor weather conditions, mainly snow, which can throw off readings. Next comes about 5 miles of scans featuring roadways that feed into U.S. 76.

Kyle Madrid, field survey chief for Cook, Flatt and Strobel, is in charge of the survey of Branson. He said the system uses established GPS waypoints as a reference to establish where it is. Then, once a primary scan is completed, it leap-frogs forward, using some of the known points as a base and weaving in new points into the established information. He said the system can scan up to about 3,300 feet, but typically scans encompass smaller areas.

“Accuracy is vital,” he said. “Every foot matters.”

Business, Pages 19 on 03/31/2014

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