Comments on: AATA Sets Meeting on Regional Authority

By: David

David — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:09:51 +0000

I really like the idea of a county-wide transportation system. This is a forward thinking concept. I hope that distribution of services/funds from the proposed will be equitable, i.e., Ann Arbor will not be subsidizing the other communities as is currently done.

By: Connie

Connie — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:16:19 +0000

Vivienne,

If you have Adobe Acrobat, there is tool in there for OCR services to recognize any text in the images. I don’t believe its available in the Reader, but that’s typically what I use so I can develop search capabilities of their documents. It isn’t perfectly accurate – but it does the job in most cases.

By: Matt Hampel

Matt Hampel — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:02:32 +0000

I've started posting some mundane AATA docs at [link]

By: Vivienne Armentrout

Vivienne Armentrout — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:48:30 +0000

Thanks for the consistent and thorough reporting on the AATA. There are some really important questions coming up, including what effect a regional authority would have on in-city service to Ann Arbor. Also, what form of governance would a regional authority have? All participating units of government would presumably have places on the board. Would the present board be “translated” to the new board?

A note on accessibility of AATA documents: many of the minutes and board packets are scanned as images. This makes them impossible to search using Acrobat utilities. Most people create documents in a word processor, then convert the document to a pdf file, which can then be searched for terms. Presently one must simply flip through pages.

I did alert staff and the then board chair to this issue some months ago, but nothing has changed.

By: Matt Hampel

Matt Hampel — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:09:39 +0000

Do you have the RFP? Would be interested to know what they mean when they say “high resolution” and “low-light sensitive”. Lots of vendor jargon out there. In any case, glad to hear that they’re thinking critically about these things.