Effective data analysis – a huge opportunity for local authorities improving transport provision

Eifion Jenkins leads the Data Science Team at SYSTRA UK & Ireland. He is passionate about bringing together experts from across the business to solve complex problems. Eifion’s expertise in data, IT and intelligent transport systems supports decision-makers and the transport technology sector across the globe. In the second of our series of articles on transport planning, Eifion emphasises just how much data there is out there and why we need to grab the opportunity today.

We can all think of a time when choosing the right approach when faced with so many complex and interrelated options is extremely daunting. Many local authorities in England have been cash-strapped for so long that having any choice at all has come to seem like a distant dream, but with the advent of a £4.7 billion Government fund designated for transport initiatives in the North and Midlands – it means that things are about to change.

From all the many possible ways to spend a large sum of money on improving transport provision, we need to be sure that we are making the right choice. Of course, the outcomes of any decision are uncertain, but is there any way to minimise that uncertainty, to silence the noise and find the signal?

The answer is yes: it is in the data. Local authorities have access to a vast amount of data that has the potential to reveal not just how and when people travel, but why. In that ‘why’ lies an essential part of successful planning for future needs.

Many authorities may underestimate the power of the resources that they already have to hand, let alone the enormous wave of new data that is available now from such things as sim cards buried in vehicles. The sheer quantity of it all can seem overwhelming. Understandably, as finances have increasingly been diverted to other priorities in the years of austerity, the capacity and expertise necessary to interrogate these resources has dwindled.

Discrete data sets fail to deliver their potential because they are not adequately assimilated with the latest tools that can combine and cross-reference them, visualising the behavioural insights that the numbers conceal. That is the value that my team can bring, not only reading the data to answer the questions being asked today, but collating and organising it into systems will make it accessible and of better long-term practical value to decision makers.

The opportunities for authorities afforded by effective data analysis are gigantic and they are only going to grow. At SYSTRA, we have barely scratched the surface of the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to interrogate enormous data sources at crazy speeds, searching for patterns and meanings that humans might struggle for decades to discover. My data science team has the experience to add human sense to the AI. Data should be considered as much a part of infrastructure as any highway, electrical or rail network. The information age is evolving much more quickly than we could ever have imagined and is giving way to the AI age, and let’s face it AI feeds on big data. Every local authority needs to ask itself if it is ready to grab all the opportunities that the new age is going to afford.

SYSTRA is offering a free facilitated workshop session to help any local authority understand what they need to do to develop their next transport strategy, irrespective of where they are in the process. To discuss this, please get in touch with Darren Kirkman at [email protected].

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