SITUATION
City of York Council (CoYC) desired to become the first UK City to manage its transport network through real-time data driven processes, to address the city's congestion and pollution challenges. The required Data Platform needed to collect, store, aggregate and push traffic data to the Smart Transport Evolution Programme (STEP) Traffic Modelling sub-system.
REALITY
The CoYC transport network previously had been managed by staff monitoring CCTV, social media feeds and urban traffic control systems. Staff then manually implement new plans, variable message signage and signal changes to ease network issues. This is time consuming, mostly reactive and not always completely accurate leading to avoidable congestion on the city’s roads.
OPPORTUNITY
CoYC created the Smart Transport Evolution Project (STEP) to enable the adoption of a more pro-active approach in monitoring, influencing, implementing policy and incident management plans. This new approach also sought to future proof the transport network, ensuring the city was free to add, remove, or change data sources in-life, creating an agnostic ecosystem enabling adoption of new technologies as they become available.
SOLUTION
CoYC implemented Alchera’s Data Hub, as a key part of the STEP project. The Data Hub is now the main repository and central integration hub used for the collection, aggregation, storage and dissemination of traffic and transport data, in real-time, within the CoYC mobility data estate. It has the added benefit of integrating freely with third-party systems required to run the network, such as PTV Optima which provides real-time multi-modal modelling based on current road conditions. This has enabled the city to largely automate what were previously manual decisions made in the control room, optimising signals to ensure the city keeps moving.
The Data Hub has enabled CoYC to visualise the broad number of datasets required to effectively manage their network, with the added advantage that new data sources, irrespective of supplier can be supplemented in, on-demand. By removing the silos of individual data sets being viewed in isolation, CoYC has the ability to fuse and interpret multiple data sources in parallel, gaining unprecedented levels of data accuracy to understand the performance of the city's road network.
Through the use of the Data Hub, CoYC are saving 100’s of Staff and customer hours a year, £000’s per fault and have greatly reduced congestion and pollution levels across the cities transport network.
‘Alchera’s Data Hub will be the data powerhouse working integrating with cutting edge traffic modelling software to provide network optimisation and predictions.’
Dave Atkinson, Head of Transport at City of York Council
