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Transportation Case Study

How The Spectus Platform Powers Traffic Analysis

Situation

‘Good Living LLC’ is a fictitious civil engineering company interested in leveraging Spectus mobility data to improve their understanding of the traffic patterns on the San Mateo Bridge. This seven-mile bridge is a large part of bay area transportation networks, and averages over 80,000 vehicles a day. They were looking for a location intelligence partner to help them direct traffic flows with confidence – and they chose Spectus

Challenge

The San Mateo bridge, being the longest bridge in California, has posed traffic concerns several times throughout its history. Specifically, Good Living wanted to understand the traffic flow on a typical weekday, including average speed distribution, percentage of free flow traffic, and congestion zones. They also wanted to know the routes commuters took when using the San Mateo bridge and the difference between inbound and outbound congestion patterns. To optimize the travel time for commuters in the Bay Area, Good Living needed high-quality vehicle data to conduct a comprehensive analysis on the traffic patterns of the San Mateo bridge.

Solution

Spectus’ data clean room produces custom location-based solutions in a privacy-focused environment, and provided Good Living with the vehicle data, mobility insights, and comprehensive visualizations they needed to inform their traffic flow analysis.

Spectus produced 3 analyses:

  • Trajectories across the bridge
  • Inbound hourly traffic breakdowns
  • Outbound hourly traffic breakdowns

Trajectories

To show the full trips taken by those who crossed the bridge, Spectus analyzed the trajectories of devices that crossed the San Mateo bridge on a given weekday. Hover over a trajectory line to see the route, duration, and distance traveled.

Inbound Traffic Analysis

Spectus analyzed the traffic data by hour to show the traffic volume, volume by speed distribution, an average speed. This dashboard provides Good Living with a full picture of the inbound congestion patterns over time and insight on “free-flow” traffic. To formalize the presence of hourly congestion events, Spectus defines “free-flow speed” as the average speed a driver would travel if there was no congestion. For the San Mateo bridge, we’ve set it to the highway’s speed limit minus 20mph.

The data shows free-flow traffic throughout the day, with high traffic volumes and congestion on the bridge between 7:00am and 9:00am.

Outbound Traffic Analysis

This dashboard provides Good Living with a full picture of the outbound congestion patterns over time on a typical weekday. The data shows above average traffic volumes between 2:00pm and 7:00pm and high congestion between 3:00pm and 6:00pm.

How does the data clean room work?

Spectus’ data clean room can be used to produce nearly any level of mobility analysis you can imagine by converting raw device-level data into upleveled privacy-safe insights. Spectus converts billions of pings from millions of devices into actionable metrics including Stops, Trajectories, and Demographics. 

The data clean room addresses data providers’ concerns about user privacy because privacy protection is baked into the Spectus platform by design. In addition, Spectus filters out Sensitive Points of Interest (SPOIs) such as locations related to health services, religious facilities, and locations with vulnerable populations to ensure that data is handled responsibly and not exploited for unethical purposes. 

Interested in learning more about how mobility insights can strengthen your traffic analysis?

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