Thinking globally and acting locally
By Dan Kelly
The UN Sustainability goals clearly outline where we need to get to for health and wellbeing, sustainable communities and climate action, including a reduction in Greenhouse House Gas (GHG) emissions. Cities and governments have responded, and the Victorian Government, like others, have declared a climate emergency and partnered with local government on a number of climate change initiatives.
Yet few of these state and local projects deal directly with transport emissions and specifically the main GHG offender, car travel.
Governments are struggling to deal with traffic congestion after lockdowns in any real and cohesive manner. There is little in the way of any strategic planning that can deal with the here and now of car travel (and plan for the future) when COVID-19 and fears of infection have blunted the main policy instrument — public transport.
Tactical urbanism is touted as part of the answer, but all too often, it’s just a fancy term for a siloed approach, one-off trials, and needing to be seen as doing something.
Private car use needs to be brought inside the tent of future transport planning and mobility discussions while learning to live with the pandemic and slowly transitioning to Electric Vehicles. Providing for more efficient car travel in this transition period is key to ensuring we spend less time driving.
Learning Opportunities
There is no more obvious example of the travel problem (and the opportunity) we have than how the latest iteration of the pandemic has further reinforced the car’s status as the top mode of transport. Frequent lockdowns and fears of infection are driving the new normal of car use resulting in increased localism with fewer people being able to, or wanting to, leave their suburb.
The good news is we have the evidence to strategise how we will deliver against sustainability and health targets and act locally to get from A to B with less carbon footprint.
How? By using traffic data as a service platform to investigate and evaluate how we can:
- Decrease the number of trips and increase trip efficiency
- Evaluate transport interventions and climate change initiatives, like the ‘walk to school’ to decrease emissions and pressure on high-demand school car parking
- Deliver on our aspirations in a joined-up way beyond ad hoc tactical urbanism.
It’s the last point where we can assess if we’ve had the right impact from our policy shifts and trials or whether we need to take corrective action because we’ve had little or the wrong impact? To paraphrase a line from The Matrix, to do smart transport properly, we will need ‘data…a lot of data.’
Like in the movie, we don’t have much time. Transport planning needs to catch up by taking advantage of modern GPS tracking methods, cellular, fleet information, and smart infrastructure to capture, and report on, an entire traffic network as a living organism.
Thankfully, INSIGHT, a traffic Data as a Service (DaaS), does away with the need to take two months to cleanse one month worth of open-source data. With INSIGHT, you get the power of IoT datasets, cleansed and validated with Machine Learning algorithms, to get immediate quality insights into the flow of people across the entire network.
INSIGHT is a traffic DaaS web platform that:
- Has over 2 trillion data points — drawn from multiple data sources
- Covers more than 35,000 kilometres of roads
- Is updated monthly and allows you to search in 15 minutes segments.
Impressive numbers, but what does that mean in terms of data helping to solve sustainability, health and climate issues at the street and suburb level? And improve people’s lives in line with sustainability goals?
The Upside of Traffic Data in Doonside
To bring this closer to home, let’s look at Doonside. Doonside is a small suburb in Sydney’s Blacktown LGA, where 27.5% of trips originate in the local suburb, while 40% of trips come from surrounding suburbs. With the average trip being 5kms, a measurable number of short vehicle journeys can be decreased by moving patrons onto other forms of transport. Surveys show people are willing to walk and ride 15 to 20 minutes to their destination, so this IoT dataset allows us to measure the size of the opportunity for impactful change.
That’s a start. Now let’s punch deeper and isolate a key metric for mapping and tracking transport changes and project success.
Schools are classic local activity generators, and the local primary school in Doonside is no different. It is a great candidate for an active travel initiative. Image 2 (below) shows the number of east- and west-bound trips that occur past a primary school in Doonside between 8.30 and 9 am. Using INSIGHT, we can isolate the morning drop-off data, which provides an average vehicle count of 627 on 14 March 2020, just before the first COVID-19 lockdown.
On 31 March, we can see that once lockdown hit and schools were shut, the vehicle count dropped to 380 for the same time of day. This means we can attribute 247 trips at school drop off time, giving us a target to aim for when introducing active travel initiatives and a baseline to measure impact against.
Triple Bottom Line Benefits
INSIGHT traffic data and tools can be used as a measure to model the impact of initiatives and changes. Traffic and people movement is a social indicator (which in turn shows economic activity) and can be used as a ‘triple bottom line’ measurement of transport and other initiatives. This ensures smart decision-making that benefits the entire ecosystem.
By accurately measuring traffic in a local area or on a particular street segment, the size of the problem can be quantified, and the effectiveness of active travel initiatives can be measured. By reducing trips numbers and having reliable traffic data for reporting, the behaviour change can be measured to promote sustainable choices in local travel.
Exploring how traffic data can help your business?
Watch the webinar recording on Making data-driven decisions for sustainable mobility on a local level here.
