Big data analytics firm for the transportation industry, StreetLight Data Inc. has added new and more detailed metrics to its InSight cloud-based software platform, allowing agencies to determine funding needs for highway improvements, and forecast road maintenance expenditures.
StreetLight has long offered Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT) metrics, a critical tool for transportation professionals analyzing infrastructure projects, estimating road safety or seeking highway funds. The company is now unveiling new Annual Average Hourly Traffic (AAHT) counts and Monthly Annual Daily Traffic (MADT) counts. Transportation planners, engineers and other industry experts can now access hourly, daily, weekly and monthly traffic metrics using the InSight Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform. The new highly-detailed AAHT and MADT metrics can help state and local governments to reduce their current traffic and transportation challenges while aiding long-term planning decisions, such as the widespread introduction of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs).
Traditional traffic data collection and measurement methods require installing expensive sensors, investing in driver surveys and then using those results to model estimated counts, all of which require a lengthy and expensive process of getting approvals, training staff, collecting actual counts, and validating data that can typically take months and come at very high costs, often with limited accuracy. Based on more than one trillion annual location records across Canada and the USA, StreetLight’s proprietary machine-learning algorithms draw on 365 days of data on more than 4.5 million (7.2m km) miles of roadway. The new AAHT and MADT counts are available for both large urban streets, as well as small rural roads.
AAHT and MADT counts are essential for identifying and forecasting traffic conditions for specific days or months of the year. For example, in some communities traffic on a Wednesday afternoon in March can be dramatically different from traffic on a Wednesday afternoon in July. A community in Florida may gather traffic information during April, then extrapolate monthly traffic metrics from that data. However, those results may not account for heavier tourist traffic in winter months and lighter travel mid-summer. Similarly, they cannot reveal changes in road usage during storms and other unusual events. With StreetLight’s new AAHT and MADT metrics, communities are able to access this information more accurately and with near real-time results.
“Transportation planners have always found it difficult to deliver accurate monthly and daily traffic data due to technological constraints, increasingly tight budgets, small survey response numbers and data sets, as well as complex seasonality factors,” said Laura Schewel, CEO and co-founder of StreetLight Data. “We are excited that we now have the capability to offer this level of detail almost immediately, wherever and whenever it’s needed.”
