The Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) program has a need to identify congestion hotpots, flood impacts, and severe storm impacts to support the Emergency Planning Transportation Data Initiative and national highway traffic cluster analysis (Waze “Hot Spot” Analysis).  BTS utilized the Secure Data Commons (SDC) to build proofs-of-concept of analytical weather-transportation impacts.

Emergency Planning Transportation Data Initiative

The Emergency Planning Transportation Data Initiative is supported by a partnership between BTS and National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). SDC provided support to Researchers conducting data integration on severe weather with the national transportation system, historical analysis and forecasting components, and post-op evaluation of dataset limitations/opportunities. This initiative was able to make discoveries useful for public safety and emergency evacuation preparedness at the multi-state scale. 

Waze “Hot Spot” Analysis

The Waze “Hot Spot” Analysis builds upon research Volpe has already conducted for the Safety Data Initiative. It includes the research evaluation of SDC Waze data, developing a proof of concept on a subset of the nation’s highway system data, and an experiment on predictive analysis on traffic forecasts. BTS Researchers were able work on machine learning and cluster analysis to evaluate options for creating a daily dashboard of “hot spots” of operational characteristics on the nation’s highway system: Congestion/traffic jam locations, Bottleneck sites, and Weather-related Road closures.