By Morwen Johnson

Efficient transport is vital to the smooth running of businesses and everyday life in a city. The emergence of new technologies is rapidly transforming both traffic management systems and the analysis of travel activity and transport modelling.

At the Open Data Awards last week, the Greater London Authority won the Open Data Publisher Award, with the opening up of Transport for London’s data infrastructure being highlighted as an example of how whole systems thinking can create an ecosystem and value chain supported by data.

Smart transport solutions

Within the UK, initiatives such as the Future Cities Demonstrator (based in Glasgow) and the Catapult Centres, both established by Innovate UK (fomerly the Technology Strategy Board), are exploring innovative ways to use technology and data to make life in cities safer, smarter and more sustainable. The UK Government has also continued its support with its announcement in the March 2015 budget of new funding to support the technology market around the Internet of Things.

Smart solutions involve data gathering, real-time processing, data analytics and visualisation. Using data ultimately aims to support better decision and enable innovation. New technologies and availability of data, and the near-universal uptake of mobile devices, therefore offers an opportunity to innovate in order to make our urban areas more adaptive and resilient.

‘Intelligent mobility’ is a sector of the wider transport industry which is predicted to be worth around £900 billion a year globally by 2025. A recent report suggested however that the UK faces major transport-related data gaps which limit its ability to take advantage of this market. In some cases this relates to datasets which do not yet exist at all in the UK, and in other cases to datasets which exist only in ‘silos’ or which are not yet open or freely available.

Data supports transport planning

Transport for London has allowed their data, which has been collected from Oyster Smart Card use, to be open and available to developers to create a range of Apps which allow the public access to travel information, much of it real-time.

Many councils across the UK are using data to improve journey planning in a similar way. The itravelsmart App from Cheshire West & Chester Council won the Best Smarter Travel App award at this year’s Smarter Travel Awards for a tool that integrates travel information, interactive maps and public transport timetables.

At a city-wide level, using an intelligent transport system can also help improve capacity and manage traffic flows. Cities such as Amsterdam, have been leading the way in using open data to support transport planning – back in 2012 Amsterdam won the World Smart Cities Awards 2012 with its Open Data Program for transport and mobility. Since March 2012, the city’s department for Infrastructure, Traffic and Transportation (DIVV) has made available all its data on traffic and transportation to interested parties. Data about parking (tariffs, availability, time), taxi stands, cyclepaths, and stops for touring cars are public now, as well as real-time information on traffic jams on main roads around the city.

The Urban Big Data Centre was established by the UK Economic and Social Research Council to address social, economic and environmental challenges facing cities. It launched in 2014 and focuses on methods and technologies to manage, link and analyse multi-sectoral urban Big Data, and to demonstrate the use of such information, for example in transport planning.

From smarter data to smarter decisions

To make a city smart and to use smart infrastructure, it’s vital that the transport system functions to the best of its ability. By utilising data from a variety of sources, such as open transport data, sensor data, crowdsourcing and other social media sources, it seems there is potential for a huge improvement in efficiency by increasing integration.

Encouraging modal shift can also have an impact on environmental problems, such as pollution and carbon emissions. Using data, whether it is open data or big data, can help inform evidence-based decision-making in these important policy areas.

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We’ve written a briefing on the emerging use of big data and open data in transport planning, including case studies from the literature.

Idox has recently announced its acquisition of Cloud Amber Ltd, a leading supplier of integrated transport solutions to local authorities.

The Idox Knowledge Exchange are also hosting a Big Data Knowledge Transfer Project in collaboration with Salford University.