search

ropensci / ozunconf18

repository for the rOpenSci ozunconference 2018
31 stars 7 forks source link

Brisbane road traffic challenge 🚗 🚌 🚚 #7

Open RPanczak opened 5 years ago

RPanczak commented 5 years ago

Brisbane City Council @brisbanecityqld provides access to Traffic Management — Intersection volume 🚗 🚌 🚚 dataset (access with login, data under CC BY 4.0 license). Every minute a JSON file is exposed to the world providing:

Real time data of traffic volume and occupancy of lanes at Brisbane City Council signalised intersections and approaches.

There are ~960 geocoded 🌐 intersections. Each intersection has minute by minute 🕙 data on measured & reconstituted flow and degree of saturation (docs here and here).

IMHO, there are at least two possibilities to work with this challenging dataset:

  1. Dynamic approach: trying to digest JSON and build interactive dashboard monitoring traffic and other important factors (public transport? cycling? shared bikes? weather? etc.)

  2. Static approach: trying to digest large(ish) historical dataset and try to model, explain and predict traffic either in a city as a whole or spatiotemporally. I've been collecting data since mid Sept. It's a challenging set that could generate over 22k JSON files per month and will require pulling some tricks to process and model that. Analysing hourly, weekday/weekend or holiday/regular day traffic would be probably first exploratory step. As one potential explanatory variable we could use weather ⛅️. UQ SEES exposes minutely updated data that could be used for such purpose. It would be cool to see what a certain amount of rain 🌧 could do Brisbane traffic!

njtierney commented 5 years ago

Wow, this sounds like a great source of data!

One question - is it hard to become a registered user to get the data?

RPanczak commented 5 years ago

You have to create account. I believe there are no restrictions beyond that. Creates a bit of hassle for scraping, but beyond that I haven't had any issues.

jesse-jesse commented 5 years ago

Could we do something with the data that can inform Brisbane City planning?

RPanczak commented 5 years ago

I could imagine few possibilities.. identifying bottlenecks in traffic? :car: :car: :car: effects of weather? :umbrella: linking that to public transport and/or bike sharing? :bike: