The Transportation Data Challenge

Cities have the data. What they need is clarity. See how a trusted GIS-powered exchange is helping transportation agencies finally get a complete picture of their road networks.

Ask any Canadian city about their goals for their transportation network and they’ll tell you the same thing: reduce congestion and improve safety. Dig a little deeper and they will talk about how significantly construction impacts congestion, encouraging people to take transit and ride bicycles rather than driving, and about their vision zero programs that are focused on eliminating injuries and deaths on the roadways. And yet, many cities have more congestion than ever and are struggling to achieve their vision zero targets. Given how talented, focused, and determined city transportation staff are, and how much technology they’ve invested in, why is this the case?

Plenty of Data, Not Enough Answers

Transportation agencies have access to a huge number of data sources and types, such as signals, cameras, sensors, permits, construction schedules, crowd-sourced incident data, and telematics data from connected vehicles. Data comes from internal databases, vendors the city has contracted to collect data with cameras and sensors, and other vendors who are analyzing input from millions of vehicles and producing data for things like average speeds, origin-destination patterns, and vehicle safety incidents. Most of the data is in different formats, in different systems, and sometimes has discrepancies or conflicts where one data set disagrees with another.

All of this makes it extremely difficult for agencies to get a complete, end-to-end, comprehensive view of the past, current, and future state of their road network. Integrating multiple data sources can take an agency 12–18 months, and there are so many options that they often struggle to choose the best data sources to get the insights they need. At the same time, pressure to more effectively manage roadways is increasing.

Why Partnerships Alone Aren’t Enough

Many specialized vendors realize the challenges cities face with building an integrated view of the road network and have formed partnerships with each other to try to address this. For example, Kapsch TrafficCom has partnered with TomTom, a global Esri partner, to enhance its traffic management solutions by combining TomTom’s traffic data from millions of connected vehicles with Kapsch’s traffic data. The result for cities is the ability to correlate signal light timing at intersections with vehicle speed and travel time, enabling optimization of traffic signal operations. This is useful, and other similar partnerships fill in other gaps in visibility. Each pairing of vendors is still not connected to data from all the other vendors, or to internal city databases such as construction zones where a contractor has been given control of a traffic signal.

Who Owns the Digital Twin?

As cities incorporate more third-party data, It is important that cities continue to own and govern the digital representation of their road network. Cities must avoid ending up with a patchwork of vendor-owned and operated data sets. An authoritative digital twin means that cities choose when updates to the data take place, such as adding a lane closure that results in consumer mapping applications like Google Maps rerouting thousands of vehicles. To achieve this, cities must not only aggregate and integrate their own multiple sources of data but also incorporate vendor data in a structured way.

A Trusted Data Exchange

The solution to both challenges—the fragmented data sets and the need for the city to continue to own and govern the digital twin—is a trusted data exchange. Rather than requiring an agency to build integrations with every vendor or rely on the vendors to form partnerships with each other, there must be a shared exchange layer that aggregates, standardizes, validates, and correlates data from multiple sources. Each agency continues owns and maintains its own data and road network, and each vendor shares data with them through the exchange.

Why GIS?

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is uniquely suited to underpin this exchange. GIS is the technology governments have been using for decades to manage their spatial data—that is, data about the real world. In fact, many transportation agencies already use GIS to keep track of the basic properties of their roads and highways, such as where they are, what they’re made of, and when they need maintenance. ArcGIS, Esri Canada’s GIS technology, does not take over control of agencies’ data, it is a set of tools that agencies use to maintain their own authoritative road network digital twin. Put another way, ArcGIS is uniquely positioned to be a vendor-neutral platform for roadway data exchange because it’s the enterprise geospatial platform already in use in the majority of cities in Canada.

How TGX Works

The Transportation GeoXchange® (TGX) is Esri Canada’s implementation of ArcGIS for transportation agencies who need a unified, comprehensive, standardized digital twin of their road network, including all required internal and third-party data sources. For example, for cities to better manage lane closures, the TGX will pull data from the city’s lane closure permit database, real-time lane closures detected by cameras on vehicles (such as from Raven Connected), crowd-sourced reports from Waze, and traffic analytics from TomTom. TGX integrates, validates, and cross-references all these data sets and generates clear and useful insights such as which lanes are closed by a contractor without a permit.

Working Together for Safer Roadways

Improving roadway congestion and safety is challenging without a complete picture of what’s causing slowdowns or dangerous situations. The data required to form this complete picture is available, but must be integrated in a scalable, vendor-neutral way that allows transportation agencies to maintain control and authority over their road networks. TGX, built on ArcGIS, is a win-win for agencies and vendors, as agencies get the integrated insights they need and vendors get increased distribution as their data becomes more valuable. The Esri Canada ITS team would love to talk to agencies and vendors about how TGX can help everyone work together for safer and more efficient roadways.