In the fourth episode of our regular podcast series, Inside Intertraffic, we focus on the subject of traffic data. The science of capturing, processing and analysing traffic data is rarely absent from the pages of the traffic industry’s publications but the imposition of lockdown regulations across the globe over the last few months has given the sector’s protagonists an unprecedented opportunity to observe just how acutely the coronavirus pandemic has affected traffic patterns… and how the data from those patterns, created by those unheralded restrictions on movement, could be used in the future.
Paul Hutton and Kevin Borras talk to three key members of the traffic data community to ascertain how their organisations monitored the changes in traffic behaviour. TomTom’s George de Boer and Stephanie Leonard discuss the company’s revamped Traffic Index that allows for a comparison between traffic levels in 450 cities and how the easing of lockdown measures at different times across Europe made for some fascinating reading.
PTV’s Paul Speirs is our second guest and our conversation focused on EU border movements during lockdown. Noticing a significant increase in queuing times at the border control crossing points, particularly between Poland and Germany where perishable and urgently needed goods were being held up PTV teamed up with data suppliers to help the trucking industry map routes more effectively.
Episode four wraps up with the City of Leuven’s Eli Nomes who tells us how citizens are monitoring and collecting data themselves, thanks to an EU project called Telraam. Eli also talks about the different demands placed on him and his colleagues by different sectors of society and how the combination of their expertise and “citizen science” meant that Leuven had an extremely clear picture of the daily traffic situation during lockdown.
