Planning Study 24, 2012 Historical Travel Time Data Analysis

Speed and travel time data is playing an increasingly important role in transportation decision-making. Travelers use it to determine the best route to choose while the state and local transportation agencies use it in a wide range of applications, including performance measures, traveler information, incident management, air quality analysis, etc. Historically, collecting speed and travel time data over an entire network was rather expensive because it relies on extensive floating car runs. With the increasing market penetration of the GPS tracking devices and GPS enabled mobile phones, the source for travel time and speed data has been greatly expanded. Data collection and processing is no longer carried out by the transportation agencies only. Private vendors have put together rather comprehensive programs in gathering data from various sources, such as fleets, public sector traffic monitoring devices, and consumer GPS locational data. This data has been used at national, statewide, and local levels in generating mobility measures and providing support to a variety of functions such as travel model validation, air quality analysis, congestion management, and operations planning. This research aims to (1) provide additional understanding of the private travel time/speed data for Kentucky roadways on its quality and potential applications, such as generating travel time based highway performance measures, (2) refine a framework to extract information from the database for these applications, (3) analyze the data needs of stakeholders, evaluate the effectiveness of the vendor data in addressing these needs, and provide recommendations on future data purchase plans; (4) continue to enhance the network conflation methodology to create a more efficient annual workflow; and (5) provide custom speed data sets to the state and TMAs applications based on the 2012 data.