VTM at the forefront: insights from Urban Mobility Conference 2024

On April 10th, VTM was present at the Urban Mobility Conference 2024 organized by Soiel International in Milan. The event focused on the topics of the new urban mobility and smart cities: sustainability, multimodality, digitalisation, and safety.

Several public and private entities joined the conference and shared their visions, supported on case studies of planned and realized projects and innovative solutions to face the challenges of the future evolution and the new concepts of mobility.

The importance of data and big data was one of the topics discussed during the conference. We have access today to an unprecedented quantity and variety of data, made available from platforms such as TomTom, Streetlight, Teralytics, Vodafone, and several other mobile data providers. These data sources represent a tremendous opportunity  to have a better understanding of mobility patterns and trends and consequently to improve  planning and operational processes for meeting the needs of the users through  smart and data-driven approaches.

Big data provides mobility information on, travel times, speeds, origin/destination distribution and nature of traffic generators, mode of travel, among others. Such information can be available both in real time and historically and allows analysing the evolution of specific indicators  with a high level of detail. Big data are valuable for several applications, including:

• Monitoring network performance, e.g. in relation to route choice or congestion and delays, identifying the critical points of the network and pointing possible solutions
• Understanding the impact of critical events, such as the closure of a road section or an accident, including the build-up and duration of queues and the rerouting dynamics in the area affected by the event
• Gain information on junction movements in order to optimize intersection management and reduce delays.

VTM has extensive experience in this field and is at the forefront in the use of big data to answer mobility challenges. We have used such sources of information jointly with internally developed software tools in several advisories for our clients.

Mobile big data allows for a better understanding of the mobility dynamics and the demand potential of transportation infrastructure and services. This constitutes a new way to undertake the study of mobility projects and address its peculiarities, providing further support to the assumptions and robustness to the outputs of our advisories.