Traffic wastes time and money almost everywhere on the planet, so congestion is the bogeyman many transportation planners hope to defeat.
Attendees at the most-recent Transportation Techies Meetup – held at Mobility Lab in Arlington, Va., and focused on traffic solutions – got a taste of several early-stage tech/planning options.
“Data and technology are becoming more and more crucial in planning for safer streets. This becomes even more important as autonomous vehicles begin to come online,” said Paul Mackie, Mobility Lab’s communications director.
How are DOTs handling data for projects like AVs and Vision Zero?
The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT ) is rolling out its Smarter Roads data portal built specifically to enable public application or business development. Virginia Lingham, the program manager for connected and autonomous vehicles, presented the new site, which she and the agency hope serves as a national model for state DOTs to better manage their roads.
VDOT’s Virginia Lingham
Data that was once scattered around the agency now exists in one space that makes it easy for the public – such as Techies regulars – to work with. Smarter Roads has 24 different feeds, including vehicle miles traveled, crash data, and average daily traffic, that developers can easily integrate into websites and apps, pulling directly from the portal.
Lingham also mentioned that the portal will be especially useful in managing self-driving vehicles, especially by providing a two-way data feed. AVs will communicate their data to VDOT, and then the agency can disseminate that information to help those vehicles organize themselves on the road, improving safety and efficiency.
Washington D.C.’s Department of Transportation (DDOT) is taking this data one step further to make roadways safer for its most vulnerable users: bicyclists and pedestrians. Jonathan Rogers introduced a video-analytics tool in development that can help transportation agencies identify dangerous intersections and intervene before people die.
This is an important development in the commitment to Vision Zero, the District’s effort to end traffic fatalities by 2024. DDOT has now added footage from its camera feeds into the project, which we previously wrote about here.
DDOT’s Jonathan Rogers
How companies are using data to make streets safer
Private companies are also taking advantage of transportation data in the pursuit of safer streets. Carey Anne Nadeau showed how Open Data Nation, a local data analysis firm, is working on Vision Zero efforts as well, “bringing methodology and science to using data to prevent deaths.”
Open Data Nation’s Carey Anne Nadeau
Nadeau explained that many planners still “look in the rearview mirror,” examining crashes that have already happened. Instead, we could look ahead, through the windshield, using a variety of data inputs – not just traffic – to predict danger and prevent deaths from happening in the first place.
Importantly, Nadeau and her team have looked to other community members, beyond the people who work in transportation, to identify what matters in evaluating where danger lurks for road users. For example, Nadeau discovered that it makes sense to account for alcohol-licensed establishments or large-scale public events, which can influence street safety as much as how many cars are on the road.
Agencies and companies like Open Data Nation are aware of how important it is to understand this data while self-driving technology is still under development in order to better use the technology as it becomes widespread.
Going green is the bonus in transportation tech planning
It is important to ensure that using technologies to make traffic safer and more efficient does not revive car-centric planning but empowers bikes and pedestrians to retake public spaces.
Two traffic engineers have focused on the vehicular perspective by exploring traffic-signal optimization to move vehicles more efficiently through cities.
David Nguyen introduced ThruGreen, an app he developed to better communicate vehicle positions with traffic signals. The goal is to use GPS tracking to help lights anticipate approaching traffic and then turn green at the right time to allow a user to cruise through, at the speed limit, without slowing down.
ThruGreen’s David Nguyen
Nguyen was inspired by a certain frustration with intersections that utilize “inductive loops,” sensors in the pavement that manage signal changes. He explained that, with this setup, lights can only react once someone has reached an intersection. ThruGreen is designed to smooth out traffic flows, or at least trips for app users, by harnessing the knowledge of a vehicle’s behavior farther out from the intersection. The current framing feels like a car-centric solution for a car-centric problem, but Nguyen did clarify that this is a big step – “one that needs to happen for a whole lot of other things to be able to happen.”
In a similar project, Xiao-Feng Xie focused on smart urban-signal networks, developing programs that he hopes will reduce the cumulative delay for traffic within cities. These signals would adapt to traffic in real time, sensing conditions extracted from live data streams to improve efficiency and safety. These networks could develop capabilities such as traffic-demand analyses, crash analyses, and timing adjustments to reduce pedestrian waiting intervals. This could also help to manage the growth and movement of automated vehicles, using two-way data streams, as Lingham mentioned with VDOT, to provide data for local agencies and AVs alike to efficiently move vehicles through a street system.
At this point, there should constantly be “planning breakthroughs” provided via tech
For those looking to play with traffic on their own, there are plenty of tools out there. Dylan Moriarty provided an overview of Overpass Turbo, a web tool that allows users to filter data from Open Street Map to develop a granular understanding of local spaces. Such individual efforts may lead to planning breakthroughs.
Dylan Moriarty
By better understanding traffic and street information, planners and the public can help make it safer and easier to get around.
Photos of Xiao-Feng Xie and other by Michael Schade of Mobility Lab.