In order to help transportation planners track vehicle usage during the Covid-19 ‘shelter-in-place’ programs across the US, StreetLight Data, in partnership with Cuebiq is offering free access to its vehicle miles travelled application – VMT Monitor – a tool that could help predict future gas tax revenues, which have important implications for future funds.
Using it planners can access VMT metrics segmented by county (over 3,100 are catered for across the USA) updated every 48 hours, providing accurate metrics, at no cost.
StreetLight, which specialises in data analytics for mobility, and longtime location intelligence partner Cuebiq have joined forces to develop this resource. Cuebiq has also developed a near-real time Mobility Index, validated by a coalition of leading research organisations leveraging its insights to improve the outbreak forecast and response.
To turn this Index into a daily VMT estimate, StreetLight fused Cuebiq’s Index with its own algorithms that transform GPS data into contextualised, aggregated, and normalised travel patterns, as well as its deep repositories of data depicting historical VMT.
VMT data is critical to estimating and projecting gas tax and toll revenues (which feed budgets), pollution changes and more. StreetLight’s map and downloadable metrics allow planners to account for this unprecedented volatility in travel.
“Transportation professionals make critical budget and planning projections based on gas tax revenue and other factors derived from VMT,” said Laura Schewel, CEO and co-founder of StreetLight. “The recent massive drop in travel is throwing off all those plans. This data-driven map gets the key metrics out quickly, with local granularity, to those who need them. Planners, like everyone else, are adjusting to a new reality and we’re here to help navigate it. We hope this, in some way, can help our transportation community in this difficult and unprecedented time.”
The map and data will be accessible for free to all planners, researchers and engineers, as well as the general public and StreetLight’s current customers, on the company’s website at www.streetlightdata.com/VMT-monitor.
