Abstract Manager

Data is key to making good decisions. So, when municipalities undertake traffic and road safety studies, the first step to is to organize the collection of data.  If the focus is on a single intersection or small corridor, field equipment such as cameras, loops or speed detectors can be deployed to collect data over a few days for review and analysis.  But what if a more holistic review is required to identify areas of frequent “Near Misses” on the road network or longer time periods are required for review of the benefits from safety modifications? 

That’s where the promise of connected Driver data comes in. LBS data or Location Based Service data - is collected from mobile phones, and is generated by a mobility SDK embedded in consumer applications. For now, it is much more equitable than connected vehicle data - since everyone has a phone, but not everyone has a new car that is connected.

The City of Ottawa partnered with Michelin DDi - the business unit within Michelin Group specialized in driving data and driving behavior data analysis -to investigate a number of use cases and support current safety reviews underway.  These efforts included supplementing existing collision data with connected driver data that shows locations of excessive speeding and harsh braking events that aren’t reflected in the collision data along two rural arterials roads currently under review, as well as at rural intersections of rural arterials across the City.  

Additional use cases were for the assistance in identifying high speeds on urban arterials for potential automated speed enforcement (ASE) camera installations and also to support the long term evaluation of two ASE cameras that have been installed for a 30-day period before the cameras were installed and at periods of 1, 3 and 6 months after the installation to determine the geographic impact and temporal effect of the cameras on the speed and braking activity of vehicles along these two corridors.

This presentation will discuss the use cases investigated and the results of using connected driver data to support decisions on road safety initiatives by the City of Ottawa.