These two things are true: 1) Travelers dislike slow traffic, and 2) slow traffic is sometimes an inescapable result of things that people do like—cities with popular destinations. Conventional transportation practice responds well to No. 1, with well-known standards for delay and capacity. Practice has no clear standards to deal with No. 2—what to do in places where speeding up cars amounts to destroying the village in order to save it. A new study of neighborhoods in Los Angeles, a place with more than a little congestion, helps fill this gap.
trip-making
New SSTI Resource: Understanding Trip-Making with Big Data
SSTI has released a new resource for decision-makers interested in using big data to understand travel patterns, but who are not sure how to get started. This new brief provides an overview of trip-making data from cellphones, mobile apps, and in-vehicle GPS devices. It shows example applications and offers lessons learned from our recent Connecting Sacramento study and from past studies in Colorado and Virginia.
SSTI releases Connecting Sacramento: A trip-making and accessibility study
For several years, SSTI has worked to advance best practices in the use of two emerging technologies: accessibility metrics and trip-making data from mobile devices. Our recently completed study, Connecting Sacramento, was an essential part of that effort. This study brings together these technologies and tests their application in identifying and prioritizing first- and last-mile-connections to transit, among other uses.
Connecting Sacramento
Connecting Sacramento is the first study to incorporate both accessibility analysis and tripmaking data, including data from multiple sources, and assess how they can be used together to guide transportation- and land use-related decisions. This study focused specifically on opportunities to improve first- and last-mile connections to light rail transit in Sacramento, but its findings are widely applicable.