Article · July 28, 2023

Mobility data: a goldmine for making the right decisions - and tracking them

Origin-destination data as the foundation of mobility policy

Decisions on mobility infrastructure and service shape daily life. To make them sharper, they need to rest on real usage data - including data from private car users.

Decisions about mobility infrastructure and service play a crucial role in daily life. They shape how easily we move around, reach our destinations and interact with our environment. To make those decisions more relevant, more effective and better for the customer and citizen experience, they need to rest far more on usage data from collective mobility - and also on data from private car users, whose share remains largely, perhaps excessively, dominant. All the more so at a time when reducing single-occupancy car use is a priority.

Collecting and activating usage data, with origin-destination (OD) pairs as the target, is an invaluable resource for understanding how local populations and visitors move. That data covers departure and arrival points, routes taken, travel times and - when examined in depth - user preferences for all or part of their journey.

By analysing this information, decision-makers can identify the busiest areas, peak hours and bottlenecks in the transport network. Investment in infrastructure can then be targeted far more precisely, concentrating improvements where they are most needed. It also reveals the right sequencing of multimodal services - park-and-ride facilities, the right incentive pricing, the most appropriate communication campaigns.

Towards a “decision-maker experience”

Ultimately this data should deliver, at the lowest possible cost, what everyone is aiming for: affordable personalisation of transport services. And for decision-makers in local authorities and companies, an improvement in what might be called the decision-maker experience - for taking mobility decisions and following through on them.

IMPACT CONSULTANTS and Mobility Metrix have joined forces to take on this challenge: helping local players use and activate the customer data available to them, within GDPR rules, to steer their mobility policies better.

• An inventory of locally available data, and the best organisation to make it usable in practical, compliant and also ecological terms - digital footprint under control;
• The right procedures for collecting and sourcing complementary data, particularly on private vehicle usage;
• The right presentation, to make that data genuinely useful for decisions;
• The right discipline and tools to track the results of decisions taken, and to inform the next ones.

An article by Paul de Rosen - IMPACT CONSULTANTS - and Mobility Metrix.