Mobility analytics company StreetLight Data Inc. has officially launched its new Traffic Diagnostics tool that can help transportation planners identify the cause of traffic jams and prioritize multimodal travel demand management solutions.
Offered with limited features to select customers in Beta mode in February, Traffic Diagnostics is now available to new and existing StreetLight Data customers anywhere in the USA and includes enhanced capabilities. As well as diagnosing the cause of jams, the Traffic Diagnostics tool also integrates lessons and strategies from leading transportation thinkers. The result is a unique tool that assists in Multimodal Planning and Travel Demand Management (TDM) to solve congestion problems. The new diagnostics tool is a unique and powerful addition to StreetLight Data’s proprietary InSight system, an on-demand platform for turning ‘big data’ from mobile devices into transportation data analytics.
The InSight platform enables communities to generate real-world, actionable insights into travel patterns that can help make cities smarter. Traffic Diagnostics offers an innovative new way to look at a community’s transportation challenges with an overlay that locates traffic jams, analyzes the reasons they occur, and suggests the best solutions for each individual jam, focusing on optimal locations for new bicycle lanes and sidewalks, transit routes, employer shuttles and network improvements.
Traffic Diagnostics is an intuitive and efficient tool to maximize the impact of investments in TDM and congestion mitigation. By providing actionable analytics and interactive visualizations, it saves time by helping planners compare traffic volume and causes of congestion across thousands of traffic jams in just minutes; it saves money by putting the right infrastructure in the right location; and it enables users to create unique visualizations that can convey the story of traffic jams to stakeholders.
Traffic Diagnostics also offers transportation planners a breakdown of data-driven project opportunities that can provide long-term solutions to traffic jams. By automatically generating project shortlists with high potential, the tool helps public agencies quickly identify the best projects for deep-dive analyses and public engagement. This enables them to prioritize expenditures on the highest potential initiatives.
“Congestion is a concern for almost every community, and adding more lanes is not a long-term solution. We want to help manage demand. Each traffic jam is different, and getting more complicated every day as rideshares and e-commerce deliveries interact with drivers picking up kids from school. Finding the best solutions requires deep analytics of each jam’s particular causes,” said Laura Schewel, CEO and co-founder of StreetLight Data. “In order for local and state governments to keep pace with rapidly evolving transportation challenges, they need the right data tools and technology. We are excited to launch our new Traffic Diagnostics tool and put Big Data to work in a powerful way that helps deploy resources intelligently and optimize infrastructure investments.”
Jakob zumFelde, transportation planner at the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission in Charlottesville, Virginia, commented, “Based on my work with the tool, it is clear that the multiple features and visualizations are valuable for many types of transportation analyses. StreetLight Data’s innovative application of technology will allow for increasingly data-driven transportation planning.”
