With mobile location data, transportation planners can leverage a significantly larger sample size when compared to more traditional methods.

1. How Does Mobile Location Data
Help Transportation Planners
A large role of a transportation planner is to understand and explain how people
move around today and forecast how they will move around in the future. And,
equally as important, attempt to understand why people make the transportation
choices they make. Transportation planners need to consider important questions.
Things like - Why do so many people travel from 8 to 9 AM and 5 to 6 PM? Of the
people that cross a bridge, where do their trips begin and end? What are the home
locations of people that work in the central business district? How many days per
week do workers go to a specific office building? Can the people on this roadway
afford a toll if the Department of Transportation (DOT) wants to add a toll for new
revenue?.
The list of questions from a transportation planner can be nearly endless, and
consideration of these types of questions helps them effectively conduct their critical
job. You may wonder, How can anybody possibly gain this level of insight on how
populations move around at a regional level, let alone a statewide level?.
Welcome to the world of mobile location data. Mobile location data has been
informing transportation planners’ decisions for about 20-years, but it is more
recently becoming the talk of the industry. This is especially true given that the types
of data and their impacts have evolved over time, as well as location data becoming
more accurate with newer technologies.
Wait, What Do Transportation Planners Even Do?
You may have seen transportation planners on the side of a road or at an
intersection conducting traffic counts - typically during the morning and afternoon
peak travel periods. Or perhaps you’ve seen someone counting parked vehicles in
parking lots…or vehicles in a queue at a school drop-off/pick-up lane. These are
common field activities among this group of practitioners. But, there is much more to
this discipline. Transportation planners need to collect various data points and make
observations, and then synthesize them to make sense of what all of the information
means. They cannot look at an intersection in isolation, since transportation
networks are a remarkable combination of nodes (intersections) and segments
(roadway/railway/sidewalk/trail/etc. links). If transportation planners looked at an
isolated snapshot or intersection, the outcome could be disastrous - more
intersections would back-up and spill over into adjacent intersections, streams of
vehicles would traverse through a corridor and stop at a RED traffic signal and each
intersection. These operations are neither efficient nor desirable.
Transportation planners work on critical projects like expansions and modifications to
infrastructure (roadways, bridges, traffic signals, and public transportation networks).
They also evaluate impacts from land-use and development changes (construction

2. of new buildings, complexes, and neighborhoods) and population growth in the
future. Their efforts routinely include evaluating the viability and appropriateness of
both public and private sector projects and investments. As such, data becomes key
for this industry. This is because data routinely forms the base for their assumptions
and estimates.
Transportation planners often evaluate the adequacy of existing and proposed
transportation networks for current and future populations - residents, workers, and
visitors - within a region. Their role includes comparing transportation demand with
transportation capacity under various scenarios. Thus, it is necessary for these
planners to understand things like the origins and destinations (O-D) of trips,
measures of effectiveness throughout multimodal transportation networks, and even
the thoughts that tripmakers consider when determining their preferred routes,
modes, and destinations.
Some transportation planners work with travel demand models and forecast future
traffic volumes. Others work on corridor and sector plans, and try to determine how
localized transportation networks would be impacted. And some transportation
planners work on freight plans, attempting to have commodities and goods move
more efficiently throughout a supply chain.
As you can see, mobile location data has various applications and is ideally suited to
provide insight to the many types of transportation planners in the industry. So, what
is mobile location data and how does it help transportation planners do their job?
Let’s find out.
What is Mobile Location Data?
Mobile location data is information about where a user's phone or other device (i.e.,
a Connected Vehicle, CV) is physically located at a specific point in time. Connected
vehicles can provide location data including location (latitude/longitude coordinates),
vehicle speeds, direction/heading, and roadway segment traveled. Fleet vehicles
may also have similar location based details collected through aftermarket
equipment (i.e., equipment not installed by the automobile manufacturer).
With mobile location data, transportation planners can leverage a significantly larger
sample size when compared to more traditional methods. Despite the benefit of the
large sample size of mobile location data, this dataset typically lacks self-reported
responses - mainly because it is passively collected data.
How is Mobile Location Data Collected?
Mobile location data is a big data source and measures users’ behaviors at a large
scale. Consider that this big data source can garner information on more users than
sensors, surveys, and reports could cover. It can provide both current as well as
historical data.

3. It can even associate the same user between multiple locations. Wireless carriers,
networks, and services can collect this type of location data. For example, base
stations on a mobile phone network collect data that can be used to track the
location of a mobile phone. Similarly, on smartphones, users’ apps are able to collect
location data when users opt-in and enable location services on their device. And in
CVs, location data can be collected as the vehicles are operated along roadways
nationwide.
How is Mobile Location Data Leveraged in Transportation Planning?
Transportation planning is a wide and deep field. Some planners might focus their
career on only one element within the industry, while others might work in various
disciplines during their career. As a result, there are numerous paths a transportation
planner can take - all of which have varying uses of mobile location data. For
instance, some transportation planners work on forecasting traffic volumes - for
travel demand models, transit or corridor plans, or land-use and development
impacts for traffic impact studies. Knowing the origin and destination of trips, or the
waypoints of a vehicle’s journey, can tremendously assist the transportation planner
evaluating conditions for the project. Moreover, knowing how frequently specific trips
are made, and at what time of day, can also help this industry.
Travel Demand Modeling and Corridor Planning
Mobile location data can be used to improve travel demand models (traditional/4-
step, activity based, etc.). Travel demand models assist organizations in
understanding regional travel trends and planning infrastructure investments. They
consider the origins, destinations, trip purposes, and times of day of regional travel
demand. For example, aggregated data obtained from mobile location datasets can
be utilized to construct origin-destination (O-D) flows along specific corridors,
providing granular metrics on average speeds, vehicle volume estimates, travel
times, and regional trip flows on roadway segments. These measurements can
subsequently be used to compare various transportation demand management
(TDM) strategies, as well as provide insights into the performance of current and
future potential transportation networks. Transportation planners can then answer
questions like- How much will a bypass help the region? How will a new toll change
travel patterns? If fuel exceeds $5.00 per gallon, how would travel patterns change?.
Wrapping up
As more location data from mobile devices becomes available, it is very important for
transportation agencies to be able to use this information to better understand how
transportation networks work today and will work in the future. Applying location data
from mobile smartphones and CVs allows transportation planners to better
understand traffic flows, how the transportation network is used, and how people
traverse within and through a region. This data informs traffic forecasts and
simulations, travel demand models, and even emergency and disaster management
on a daily basis. As more mobile location data becomes available, and as it can be
obtained in more granular forms, then transportation planners will be able to draw
conclusions with a higher level of confidence, and decision makers will be able to
make better informed decisions on what transportation projects should advance in

4. the future. This is where everybody wins - if transportation networks work as
efficiently as possible.
AirSage harnesses the power of billions of GPS signals per day. Using a patented
big data approach, our team extracts geospatial insights from raw data and covers
January 2017 onward. To find out more about AirSage data solutions, visit our
website and contact us today!