What are contextual vehicle insights and why are they beneficial for transportation planners?

Contextual vehicle insights are critical in helping your department of transportation (DOT) make better decisions to optimize transportation infrastructure.

Traffic—it doesn’t happen in a vacuum and the traffic analytics prove it. But until recently, the traffic data presented an incomplete snapshot about metropolitan and regional roads and highways. That changed with the emergence of context-added vehicle insights. Now, DOT officials and city planners have the full picture of aggregate vehicle movement, such as their reasons for travel, and effects on movement patterns and flow—giving you the kind of insights needed to make traffic analytics fully actionable.

The following is an overview of contextual vehicle insights, the types of contextual vehicle insights Geotab ITS delivers, how this will help you plan better and safer traffic infrastructure and what contextual traffic data will mean for the future of transportation.

What are contextual vehicle insights?

Contextual vehicle insights answer the where, when and why, which are key to understanding traffic flow on roads and highways, providing more than trip counts, common stops and overall movement tendencies. Layered on these traffic insights are explanations of what specific kinds of vehicles are doing, making it easier to identify trends and develop proactive solutions to solve immediate and long-term transportation issues.

For example, contextual vehicle insights can provide specific answers to road and highway questions such as:

• What’s the primary purpose of trips on the road?
• What’s being moved? People or goods and at what times of the day?
• Why was this route taken by these vehicles?
• What vehicle class was used?

With these answers, DOTs and planners have the means to meet traffic challenges head on.

What types of contextualized information are available with Geotab ITS’ vehicle insights?

It used to be notoriously difficult to surface this kind of contextualized traffic data. We interceded by making it easy to find context-driven insights with Altitude. As our end-to-end transportation analytics platform, Altitude delivers vehicle insights that provide key background knowledge on vehicle classes, vehicle types, vehicle vocations and origins/destinations.

Our traffic analytics include information on:

Origins & Destinations – Commercial vehicle data helps pinpoint which starting and ending points are most common for drivers. This module allows users to optimize freight movement with enhanced planning supported by comprehensive analysis of chained trips through zones and roads segments. Granular insights into vehicle classes, vocations and industries can additionally be surfaced

Stop Patterns – Geotab ITS provides insights on where and when commercial vehicles are parking and how these patterns change over an hour, a day or a month. Users can develop better transportation, parking and infrastructure plans with detailed stop behavior across a region, neighborhood or road segment. Most importantly, these commercial vehicle insights can be captured at both macro and local levels—giving the fullest picture of how commercial vehicle stops are affecting traffic both on individual streets and across a set region.

Roads – Geotab ITS delivers vehicle insights into speed and travel time by road segments or customized geofenced zones. With these traffic analytics, you can evaluate when and where bottlenecks are occurring, analyze how efficiently goods are moving through municipalities and regions and gain perspective into the effectiveness of traffic-calming measures. Annual average daily traffic (AADT) counts additionally help you understand how much traffic a given road usually sees per day, equipping you to make smarter policy or construction decisions.

All these commercial vehicle insights are delivered as anonymized data. Geotab ITS is built on privacy by design (PbD) principles. The solution employs data privacy best practices, privacy impact assessments, ethical data practices and motivated intruder attacks (both internally and by trusted third parties).

Specificity, underpinned by PbD principles, takes the guesswork out of planning and is critical to the kinds of transportation insights necessary for developing safe and efficient roadways for both commercial and consumer vehicles.

How does bigger-picture data support agencies with stronger transportation policymaking and infrastructure planning?

Fundamentally, this bigger picture on vehicle insights gives DOT agencies the ability to be proactive, solving problems as they are emerging, instead of being on the back foot and reacting once traffic issues reach a crisis level.

There are numerous benefits of having this bigger picture, including developing a more resilient transportation infrastructure and enhancing roadway safety and freedom of mobility for all residents and commuters in a specific municipality or region.

A resilient transportation infrastructure is critical for moving goods and services. Detailed traffic analytics can help planners pinpoint heavily trafficked areas to improve and upgrade these roadways, and, just as important, identify highways and roads that may have less traffic because the infrastructure needs repairs or improvements. The result: Safer roads and better traffic flow.

Road safety is another top-of-mind priority for your agency. Having roads that are safe (with proper traffic calming measures and reduced bottlenecks) allows the free flow of traffic that helps control reckless driving and reduce collisions. These are only two of the dozens of benefits contextual vehicle insights can provide to your DOT. Having access to these contextual vehicle insights helps you develop prescriptive solutions to the transportation challenges your region faces.

Redefining the future of North American transportation with context-driven transportation data

Accessing our aggregate commercial vehicle data is the kind of long-term investment that can equip your agency to plan smarter transportation initiatives that are supported by context and specifics, not guesswork.

Being proactive will allow better use of public funds, more economic opportunities for commercial operations with fleets of vehicles and safer roads for commercial and consumer drivers alike. 

To learn more about Geotab ITS or to schedule a demo, contact us today.