The Florida Department of Transportation’s (FDOT) coordinates the planning and development of a safe, viable and balanced state transportation system serving all regions of the state. As FDOT was experiencing growth in metropolitan traffic congestion tied to both population growth and economic recovery, the organization decided it needed a systematic way to identify traffic bottlenecks and analyze their severity so it could develop a plan.
Challenge
Bottlenecks have become detrimental to Florida’s citizens, as they increase travel times, fuel consumption and emissions of air pollutants. The FDOT needed a comprehensive way to first identify these bottleneck areas and then share the research information with district level and statewide organizations to develop a plan to eradicate them.
Solution
The FDOT, through Florida State University and CDM Smith, procured INRIX Historical Traffic information throughout all of Florida to help locate bottleneck regions and clearly convey them to statewide planning organizations. INRIX Historical Traffic Flow data is a spatial and temporal database with records of average speeds in roadways and arterials throughout all 50 states in 5 minute intervals.
INRIX collects data streams from local transport authorities, sensors on road networks, fleet vehicles such as delivery vans, long haul trucks and taxis, and consumer users of the INRIX Traffic App. The 5 minute interval collection means that the historical data is recorded every 5 minutes, resulting in hundreds of millions of data points throughout the state of Florida. CDM Smith’s “Strategic Intermodal System Bottleneck Study” for the Florida DOT received high recognition at ITE’s 2014 Transportation Planning Council. The study was powered by a full year of INRIX Traffic Archive statewide for Florida. Using INRIX’s Historical Traffic Archive data from July 2010 to June 2011, CDM Smith determined the location, speed, direction and travel time for 250 million driving records on the SIS for Fiscal Year 2011. The combination of current data and widely accepted reliability measures allowed the firm to accurately identify top areas of congestion. With the findings, FDOT is now prioritizing improvements to the state’s worst bottlenecks.
Results
- INRIX vastly increased FDOT coverage and accurately identified bottlenecks and congestion areas. Specific results include:
- Provided FDOT with 711,351,697 total location reports over the state of Florida, 293,372,069 of which fell along the Strategic Intermodal Systems (SIS) network. • Covered 33,695 TMC’s throughout Florida, with 6,293 of them accounting for the SIS network.
- Identified and ranked the top 5 bottlenecks in each Districts 1-7 in order of length and congestion.
- Florida DOT and CDM Smith with the “Best Project Award” at ITE’s 2014 Annual Meeting which powered by a full year of INRIX Traffic Archive statewide for Florida.
