Big Data is complex. While its sheer vastness brings unprecedented potential, its actual impact comes down to how it is processed and organized. That’s why making Big Data accessible and easy to use is critical for solving problems, informing decisions, and seizing new opportunities. Wejo has focused on building solutions that take its source data - which includes trillions of data points generated from tens of millions of active connected vehicles - and making it more digestible and easy to use for our clients. Not only that, but our data enables customers to access its raw smart mobility data to build their own customized tools.

Wejo’s university partners are experts at translating raw connected vehicle data into purpose-built solutions that are uniquely positioned to serve the Departments of Transportation (DOTs) they support. Leaders from two organizations, Eric Jackson from UCONN’s Connecticut Transportation Institute (CTI) and Michael Martin from Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI), joined Wejo team members to share ways smart mobility data is fueling their safety research. The full recording of the conversation can be found here, but if you’re short on time, we've highlighted two projects you may find interesting:  

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Transforming CTI’s Transportation Research Center by Enhancing Its Crash Data Repository

CTI set out to see how smart mobility data could help them better understand where DUI crashes were happening across the state. By generating story maps using ESRI, the team could track crashes over time and identify where the fatalities were occurring. The interactive story map - which is updated in real-time - allows users to not only query the system and analyze which roads, times of day, and days of the week are seeing the most DUI accidents, but also the details of those individual crashes, including the diagrams drawn up by law enforcement at the scene.

The system lets both engineers and the public visualize different aspects of the crash data, whether that’s seeing if the accident was fatal or analyzing the information based on the age of the drivers involved. By supplementing this system with Wejo data, which includes instances of hard barking and other vehicle dynamics, users can more deeply understand DUI hotspots and what contributed to individual incidents such as roadway conditions or speed. Together, these insights help evaluate ways in which the Connecticut Department of Transportation might be able to reduce crashes and effectively measure the impact of any mitigation efforts deployed.

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Improving TTI’s Safety Performance Functions (SPF) with Smart Mobility

TTI saw an opportunity for smart mobility data to improve its Safety Performance Functions (SPF), a system that helps predict where crashes are likely to occur. By adding driver behavior data like hard braking, speed, hard acceleration, and seatbelt usage to traditional data such as road characteristics and observed crashes, the model provided more robust insights to users. With the enhanced data, the TTI team could calculate the rate of crashes instead of just their frequency.  

Because the expanded data set also included information on where and how vehicles were turning, it helped provide a more granular picture of trends in the data around driveways and intersections – something that helped the team answer questions from a region-specific to those journey paths.

The improved system expanded the detail available to engineers using it while inspiring discussion of different ways smart mobility data could help provide new insights that could serve as foundational to innovative transportation solutions.

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Whether Wejo is providing source data to research teams for them to build custom solutions or providing DOTs directly with pre-built solutions that enable an easy understanding of traffic trends, smart mobility data is a game changer for how we understand what is happening on our roads. Through advanced understanding, we can address issues, better distribute public investment, and improve overall safety.

For more on how Wejo can help transform the way you use data to improve the transportation ecosystem, visit: https://www.wejo.com/solutions/traffic-and-transportation-agencies.