ABJ30 Members and Friends,

Thanks so very much to all who provided ideas, text, and editing for our contribution to the surveymonkey collection of committee activities – We will be working on these topics at our Annual Committee Meeting as these descriptions are just the tip of our iceberg!!!    Thanks again!!

 

Complex infrastructure investment, planning and operations decisions require large amounts of data. Transportation data field experienced an explosion of new data sources, data collection methods and engineering analytics approaches in the past few years. High costs small sample travel time and speed data collections were replaced with low cost large sample commercial speed data from private providers. New GPS-based methods in travel surveys allowed for much higher quality data with lower respondents burden. Travel information based on cell phone data became commercially available and Bluetooth technologies became state-of-the-practice in just a few years. However what is equally if not more important is advancements in the ways transportation agencies started to approach analysis and utilization of the acquired information. Data in itself is not enough for providing well-founded knowledge about transportation system. The data from numerous often inconsistent and limited data sources needs to be integrated and transformed into knowledge. ABJ30 committee had identified new emerging data acquisition trends and transportation data integration as main directions in future transportation data management. Extensive discussions were generated by sessions on new traffic data sets at the 90^th Annual TRB Meeting and a groundbreaking data integration workshop was conducted at the 91^st Annual TRB Meeting. Necessity to analyze and integrate newly emerged large transportation data sets brought data integration issues to the forefront of the transportation data analysis and management. The workshop led to a number of research statements aimed at improvements of decision processes through innovative data integration methods and approaches.

 

The advent of the Archived Data User Service (ADUS) has been a significant breakthrough for ABJ30. In the 1990s, with leadership from members of a number of TRB committees, there was a realization in the transportation community that the large amounts of data generated by ITS systems — data such as freeway speeds and volumes from ramp meters, VMS messages, and vehicle location data — was useful for purposes beyond the immediate, real-time management of transportation systems. This data is valuable for non real-time purposes, including evaluating and refining the performance of those real-time traffic management applications, informing the planning process, research and policy-making decisions. In 1998, the FHWA created an addendum to the ITS Program Plan to articulate the need and vision for ADUS for the “collection, manipulation, retention, and distribution” of ITS data.

 

ADUS systems have been created around the country, including publicly funded, university-based archives and commercial archives. These ADUS systems store and visualize a wide variety of multi-modal data from freeway ramp meter speeds and volumes and VMS data, to include arterial signal data, transit data and more. The victory of ADUS is that transportation data archives, considered new technology fifteen years ago, are now considered mainstream technology. The initial goal of understanding archival and preservation of ITS data has been completed; however there is much more work to do on expanding both the scope of the data archives and the analytical capabilities of those archives, to ensure that the data are useful for future performance-based transportation programs.

 

One of the foundational data sources for transportation planning, originally conducted every ten years, now is being collected continuously (American Community Survey).   For the first time it is possible to get free detailed demographic data for the entire nation every year.  The new small-area products represent a paradigm shift in evidence-based practice. Up until this point it was accepted that small-area analysis might use data that was several years old.  Now there is a growing expectation that data will always be current and with enough variables to tailor the analysis to each unique project.  This trend will continue into the future with the release of small-area work flow data from the CTPP project. This data set will allow the finest level of analysis to date for journey to work, travel demand models, and workplace characteristics.

 

The convergence of pervasive sensing, wireless connectivity, location-aware technologies and social media promises to bring a sea-change in the way Big Data and Open Data can be designed, managed and used.   Sensors in the transportation system, when integrated with those in the utility, health, energy, weather and environmental management infrastructure, have the potential to foster novel new ways of improving livability, citizen engagement and smart and sustainable cities.  The Computational Transportation and Society subcommittee provides a forum to stimulate discussion on fundamental computational, design and policy innovations needed to integrate transportation to the rapidly transforming ubiquitous information society.

 

As our urban centers grow and attempt to thrive, data will provide unique understandings of how transportation systems serve the needs of passengers and freight.   ADUS archives will become increasingly important in the coming years with the advent of MAP-21 and its focus on performance-based transportation measures, and the increasing emphasis on the need to more efficiently operate and manage the nation’s transportation infrastructure.

 

The creation of programs that access Census data directly through the internet, such as TIGERweb and the Census API, will usher in a new era of government transparency and universal data access. A complicated data storage and online content delivery platform is no longer needed to create online maps or demographic analysis tools. Someone with programming experience does not need much more than a text file and some web space to make Census data accessible to the public in new and exciting ways.  In addition, data integration and new forms of urban data, including General Transit Feed Specifications (GTFS) and GTFS real-time (GTFS-R), for transit systems and GPS data that provides trace data on moving vehicles (now part of an FHWA program to provide information from GPS to MPOs and states for planning).  Cloud-based technologies will make it possible to achieve more accurate, accessible, and agile urban transportation data and data services for transportation planners, researchers, and consumers.  

 

ABJ30, along with National Data (ABJ10) and Statewide Data (ABJ20), sponsors a special session at the Annual Meetings:  the Travel Data Users Forum.  It is designed to provide a venue for the discussion of important or emerging issues regarding passenger travel data.  The Forum fosters a dialog among all data providers and users, helps identify sources of representative and applicable local and national data, serves as a venue to identify and discuss emerging issues, and encourages interaction within the passenger-travel-data community.

 

The Forum began in 2005 and previous topics included:

 

The Forum is designed as panel session geared toward engaging the audience in an open discussion.  It is broken down into 3 distinct phases, the keynote kick-off, panel remarks and the audience discussion.  It is coordinated by a moderator but tends to be very free forum.  As a result of the discussion forum research proposals have emerged, TRB subcommittees spurred on, professional contact made and data issues explored.  2014 will be the 10^th anniversary of the Forum.

 

 

 

 

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