Every day, cities and their agencies are faced with an ever-growing wealth of data on how, when, where people are moving around.
Between automatic fare collection systems, automatic passenger counters, traffic sensors, CAD/AVL, IoT, and a host of other technologies, cities are becoming overwhelmed by disparate data sources. Turning that data into information and further into knowledge, adding value at each stage to achieve insights and decision support, is easier said than done.
Increasingly, a new generation of transportation leaders is pushing agencies from a traditional “gut feel” decision-making towards data-driven insights with measurable results.
As the mobility space crowds with public and private mobility service providers and diverse active transport options, cities are looking to data for answers on how to maintain and grow transit ridership, regulate and manage, and improve service performance.
City leaders understand data offers an enormous number of possibilities, but charting the right path requires thorough planning.
For example, cities can use analytics to identify passenger flow through origin-destination pairs and modal changes. Yet, to effectively leverage advanced analytics, cities should have clean and integrated information as the underlying foundation, which is again easier said than done.
How should cities start to think about unlocking the value of their data?
Cubic found that a structured Analytics Innovation Workshop is a great way for a group of city stakeholders to think critically about their data journey.
Bringing together executives, planners, operators and analysts, the workshop leads participants through a series of exercises to identify problems, quantify benefits, address urgency, and start prioritizing.
The first step in a city’s digital transformation towards information-driven decisions is to clearly define the problem to be solved, and then pinpoint the sequence of steps to get there.
Breaking out of organizational silos, all stakeholders are encouraged to attend brainstorming sessions, raise ideas, bring out different perspectives, and produce consensus-based data use cases.
Workshop objectives include:
- Baseline current status of data usage
- Identify data challenges and highlight priorities.
- Optimizing schedules of existing and new routes.
- Identify where data could help achieve the priorities and achieve leadership buy-in.
While all city-specific data needs and strategic initiatives are different, the workshops revealed a set of common challenges, including:
- Onerous manual data management: Creating clean data requires a significant amount of data preparation, often done manually, and a limited number of team members know how to perform the work.
- Lack of a shared source of truth: Agencies have difficulty integrating data from multiple data sources and sharing across the organization so that all stakeholders are looking at a common picture.
- Translating data into insights: While agencies have a lot of data and data processes, visualizing and interpreting data to draw conclusions can be challenging.
Once a city’s challenges are identified, it becomes much easier to select data projects with the greatest return and plot out the roadmap. As the city’s data journey evolves, stakeholders can continually return to iterate on the data plan.
When a city can clearly identify the problems it faces, data changes from an overwhelming unknown to an empowering tool for change.
Outcomes of the workshop included:
1) analysis of transfer point optimization to streamline commutes and increase ridership
2) incorporating real-time data on driver attendance to mitigate missed trips, and
3) identifying available or soon-to-be-available resources.
The goal to better use data analytics in city transport networks is an admirable pursuit, and there are endless possibilities and benefits to be had. Any city's pursuit, like that of Cubic, is that for the traveling public, intelligent transport options should be made real.
Audrey Denis is a Senior Business Analyst for the Data and Analytics team at Cubic Transportation Systems.
Audrey has four years of transit industry experience across strategy, business development and project management. As a New York City native and a transplant to Washington DC, Audrey is passionate about bringing innovation to transit agencies to provide more reliable and accessible mobility options to riders. Her fun fact, and why she is so committed to improved transportation networks, is that she never learned to drive.
