East Bay Town Uses Big Data to Solve Sticky Traffic Problem

Big data “is not a secret way of selling you anything,” Laura Schewel declares. “This is a new form of civic participation.”

Schewel is founder and CEO of Streetlight Data, a San Francisco tech firm that specializes in big data collection for what she calls “gov tech” — the sweet spot where government and technology overlap to make life better. She holds up as a success story the city of Lafayette, a Bay Area suburb with 26,000-odd residents and a nasty, persistent traffic problem — precisely the sort of problem StreetLight uses Big Data to solve.

Big Data, she said, is anonymized information that was created for some other reason — GPS navigation, for instance — and which StreetLight has figured out how to leverage for other benefits. Her firm was contracted by Arup, a multinational engineering firm with a San Francisco office that was hired to study and resolve Lafayette’s traffic issues.

The city had previously studied congestion by using surveys and traffic counters, but these data sets do not explain why traffic was occurring. They provided only snapshots; Lafayette needed something more “dynamic,” said James Hinkamp, the city’s transportation planner, in an interview with Techwire.

In short, being able to track traffic dynamically through data, rather than as a series of snapshots, helped StreetLight Data and the city’s contractor, Arup, figure out some solutions.

First, Arup and the city of Lafayette determined that four main groups were contributing to traffic: public transit-bound commuters driving to the Lafayette BART station; drivers accessing State Route 24; students being dropped off at nearby schools; and shoppers heading to downtown retail stores.

They used StreetLight InSight Origin/Destination with Middle Filter Travel Metrics to assess these groups’ trip volumes and behavior. They found that improving the flow of through-travelers using SR 24 would do the most to reduce traffic.

Next, Arup will help the city identify the policy and infrastructure improvements that will do the most to ease traffic in downtown Lafayette. The Downtown Congestion Study is ongoing, and final recommendations will be subject to approval by the city.

So what went right?

Schewel: “New data collection techniques. Knowing when to flash the Silicon Valley card and when not to. This was the right time to use big data. Lafayette was very savvy,” she said. “This wasn’t just an engineering success — it was a constituent-relations success.” City Council members were able to show residents that they resolved a problem efficiently, she added

“Compared to previous methods, these are much more discreet analytics, delivered faster, measured over larger periods of time and all done at a fraction of traditional costs,” said Michael Ingalls of Natron Communications, which handles some media relations for StreetLight Data.

Indeed, Schewel said her firm charged less than $50,000 for its work on the project. The city has published the project timeline on its website.

Said planner Hinkamp, “The ultimate value that StreetLight Data brought us was in being able to see traffic information that we had not seen before in our planning efforts. Arup was really the one turning the dial on the software. It’s fair to say that in future transportation planning efforts, I think we would be delighted to work with StreetLight Data.”