Australian telematics technology company Intelematics, has launched a new service that allows anyone to make online purchases of its detailed, sensor-collected traffic flow data sets in an easy-to-interpret format.
Intelematics is giving businesses such as real-estate developers, traffic engineers, academics and all levels of government, the ability to better understand and harness traffic flow data for feasibility studies, traffic modelling, research and policy development. By doing so, the company says it is opening the door for new ways of thinking that will help make cities safer, less congested and more sustainable. The data currently available for purchase covers Melbourne and Greater Melbourne’s major arterial roads. By late January, the rest of the states of Victoria and New South Wales will be available. By March, all of Australia and New Zealand’s main roads will be available for online purchase from the company’s website. For those organisations looking for real-time data, API (Application Programming Interface) connections are also available.
By making its data publicly available and easier to interpret, Intelematics expects to see that it will be used in new ways that will benefit more people. For example:
- A local council could use it to measure the effectiveness of a new traffic strategy that is designed to reduce the number of incidents on a dangerous road;
- A real estate developer could use it to select the ideal location for a building, such as where to build the most accessible shopping centre, or how to locate a business centre that is conveniently accessible by public transport;
- Academics could use it to validate hypotheses, such as finding the correlation between traffic flow data and economic activity, or test simulations and develop new solutions for the future of road infrastructure and urban planning.
“Our new offering provides rich traffic flow data, delivered straight to customers’ inboxes,” explained Intelematics’ senior product manager, John Cardoso. “We believe there’s a need in the market for accessible data that doesn’t require the use of proprietary standards or platforms. So, for the first time, we are making traffic flow data available for purchase directly through our website. It’s completely self-service and the best part about it, you don’t have to be a data-scientist to decipher the data. What makes our offering so unique is that it’s incredibly easy to interpret. By doing the decoding for you, the data structure and the use of universal standards such as suburbs and street names, kilometres per hour, geographic coordinates and UCT (world’s time standard) time, can be viewed at the click of a link. We have also split the time series into a manageable size, allowing people without technical skills to be able to use the data in regular business applications such as Excel.”
Cardoso continued, “The data is available in 15-minute increments. However, if you need nine-minute, six-minute, or three-minute increments we have that too. In addition, each file purchased captures one years’ worth of traffic flow data; many companies only offer three months. We capture data through thousands of sensors located on roads, in vehicles and infrastructure. The data we capture provides context around traffic trends, accident blackspots, the most congested areas, the most dangerous roads and more. We’re now making this data available to any business, not just those with access to data analysts and software developers.”
