The Floow has recently started work on a new project, called ACUTE, which aims to Address Congestion Using Telematics Evidence. The ACUTE project is being funded by the Department for Transport (DfT) and will focus around the Royal Borough of Greenwich where The Floow is also working as part of a consortium on another government funded project MOVE_UK.
The ACUTE project starts at the same time as four other projects, headed up by companies including Siemens and Im23, which are being funded by the DfT and each will explore how to reduce congestion in differing ways across the country.
Congestion is of course a major problem in many cities across the UK and the world for a number of reasons including contributing to increases in pollution and travel time as well as decreasing the efficiency of the road network. The expected outcomes of the ACUTE project are:
- To build a better understanding of congestion, i.e. not just at fixed monitoring points but across the entire road network
- Identify improved measures of what frequency, extent and severity of congestion occurs
- The ability to use new evidential data to better understand root causes of congestion supporting improved evidence based mitigations and reductions
Currently, interventions which aim to tackle congestion are informed from limited information which may extend to fixed point sensors, infrequent manual roadside surveys or collated anecdotal evidence. Although this data is valuable for understanding certain aspects of road network usage, it does not achieve a fully comprehensive or accurate view of congestion.
The ACUTE project proposes a scalable solution involving the reuse of anonymised journey telematics data from vehicles, allowing us to gain a better picture of mass mobility including congestion across the road network.
The project draws on The Floow’s analytical experience of understanding fine grained data and large scale vehicle behaviour data. This will allow us to build a detailed statistical picture across all parts of the road network every hour of the week, highlighting where vehicles go and how they behave on the roads.
Further analysis will focus on understanding what road conditions are normal for an area to understand which characteristics lead to congestion, ballooning pollution levels and greater safety risks in vehicular environments. The results of this analysis will provide us with detailed evidence on a number of areas of road congestion including frequency, severity and causation.
The project will focus around the case study region of the Royal Borough of Greenwich and it will allow The Floow to carry out a detailed and sophisticated investigation in identifying the frequency and severity of congestion events in this area. The aim of this analysis is to build an evidence base in order to identify the root causes of congestion so appropriate prioritisations, mitigations and interventions can be applied in the case study area of Greenwich.
We are very excited to have been chosen to undertake this project and to have been selected from a large number of applicants by the DfT in order to pilot new approaches to understanding traffic. We believe this work will have a big impact on understanding congestion and we hope will be the catalyst for further research into this area.
The work will be very interesting for me and those at The Floow involved in this project; we hope to be able to gain beneficial insights not only into congestion but also to further our already strong knowledge of driver behaviour through telematics systems.
For more information about how The Floow uses telematics data to inform road and transport planning, understand behaviour or risk, please email me via info@thefloow.com.
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