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Published by Lana Dojcinovski on
“A show of hands. Who likes switching to a new business tool?” A famous study conducted a while ago by Gartner showed that 60% of corporate users get frustrated with adopting new business software. And these numbers still hold since switching to a new tool is a big move full of potential unknowns. The risk is particularly high in critical industries such as transportation.
Some of our customers were no strangers to this common fear, raising concerns about moving onto a smart traffic analytics platform like GoodVision. How did we dispel their doubts? Mainly by providing examples of transportation agencies and surveying companies that accomplished the move.
So, if you are also on the fence about moving to our smart traffic analysis solution, here are seven reasons why you should try it out and never look back, illustrated with success stories straight from our portfolio.
1. Save on data processing with a smart traffic analytics platform
Traffic surveyors traditionally collect data in conventional ways, such as traffic sensors or manual traffic counts. These methods are widely used, but not because of their efficiency. On the contrary, they’re expensive, time-consuming, labour-intensive, and drive mixed results. Still, by now, they have become a standard, so in many cases, their use is imposed.
In the case of one of our clients, the New Zealand Transportation Agency (NZTA), conventional traffic data collection methods presented a bottleneck that prevented it from obtaining the most veritable results and stretched its resources thin. For NZTA, the problem was magnified by the scope of their projects, which further inflated the costs and timeframes.
On the contrary, with video-based traffic analytics, NZTA could process large volumes of data gathered by cameras without requiring manual records collection. Thanks to the built-in features of the GoodVision Insight engine, the team could define project-specific metrics to quickly measure the performance of the existing and planned transportation systems. All in all, NZTA estimated that switching from manual methods to a smart traffic platform saved them over 50% of data processing and management costs.
Learn how NZTA replaced manual efforts with automated traffic analytics
2. Work smart, save time
It’s not just money that you lose by collecting and analysing traffic data in the not-so-good old ways. Though less tangible, time is another thing you waste with inefficient traffic data collection and analysis methods.
Time is even more essential when you need to meet a strict deadline, like one of our Polish clients, IDOM. The city of Warsaw tasked the leading engineering consulting firm with creating guidelines for optimising traffic flow and public transportation. Once ready, IDOM needed to collect traffic data from a test scene, calibrate the model, and propose a solution. All that in a mere 14 days—a timeframe way too short for standard solutions.
IDOM initially opted for GoodVision’s smart traffic analytics platform for its pedestrian counting capabilities and ease of use, but over time, even more advantages became apparent. The IDOM team could manipulate traffic videos at will, adding and editing filters, generating reports, and analysing extra movements without limits to extract exactly the data they needed. Most importantly, a short data processing time was key in meeting the deadline.
Discover how IDOM expedited traffic workflows using GoodVision
3. Tap unparalleled traffic data accuracy in real-time
All traffic modelling engines are only as good as the data they are fed. Therefore, both traffic surveyors and transportation managers should continuously work towards achieving maximum traffic data accuracy without compromising on processing speed. Ideally, the data should be delivered in real-time.
As a leader in smart city technology, Telelink needed just that: a solution that would instantly drive traffic records with near-perfect precision for their new real-time smart traffic control project in Stara Zagora, Bulgaria. Previously, Telelink already used another traffic video analytics software that they tweaked to their own needs. However, it didn’t fully meet their expectations regarding precision, automation, and scalability.
To improve accuracy without scaling up the costs, Telelink partnered with GoodVision for the project. Despite their initial worries, the team quickly discovered that the Live Traffic platform would allow them to collect more traffic metrics than the previously used solution, including queue indicators, saturation flows, or automated vehicle classification. All of them are extracted in real-time from integrated city cameras using GoodVision’s proprietary AI. And detection accuracy? Boosted from 70-80% to 97%.
How did Telelink achieve 97% event detection accuracy?
4. Gain a deeper understanding of the traffic situation
With more traffic data collected and better tools to make sense of it, you get a better perspective of your traffic situation. From that, you may even come to new, insightful conclusions.
Since 2011, Advanced Transport Research (A-T-R) has been carrying out an annual traffic survey on the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust campus, in the UK. The analysis aims to evaluate the impact of transportation interventions on the Campus and plan future ones. For that, they combine video footage, streams, and recordings captured from drones with GoodVision’s smart traffic platform.
Throughout one of these surveys, this combination led A-T-R to a range of granular-level findings. For instance, the A-T-R team knew precisely the distribution of vehicle types moving around the Campus at any given time, as well as movement patterns around critical areas such as the main bus station. Another example is trajectories and heat maps that allow analysts to detect dangerous areas and timely identify threats.
Discover all the findings A-T-R made thanks to using GoodVision's smart traffic platform
5. Act proactively with smart traffic analytics
As our ability to collect and analyse large volumes of data improves, adapting new approaches to traffic planning becomes easier. One of these just-based approaches is making accurate, data-based, and proactive traffic decisions.
WSB, a US-based consulting company, first chose our smart traffic platform due to its ability to integrate with various traffic video devices, such as drones, counting cameras, or other city monitoring systems, as well as its AI video processing capacity. Since then, WSB used GoodVision in multiple transportation planning projects.
In large part, these projects involve evaluating the impact of mobility interventions. However, in some cases, WSB was able to identify locations with a high chance of crashes or accidents where these events haven’t occurred yet. That was possible thanks to GoodVision’s trajectory tracking feature, which visualises conflicting movements of vehicles and pedestrians, showing road sections where dangerous road events are more likely to occur. With that knowledge, WSB and their clients could work on developing safety measures and improvements proactively.
See how GoodVision and WSB revolutionize transportation planning in the US
6. Get the full picture at any scale
Running traffic analytics on a larger scale can be problematic. After all, you can only have so many surveyors stationed at a limited number of road sections during a set timeframe. All that leads to fragmented results and smaller and, thus, less reliable datasets.
The scope of the traffic survey was one of the main concerns for the highway engineering and traffic data collection company The Road and its partners from the University of Thessaly, in Greece. Their traffic study encompassed 130 carefully selected crucial intersections in Thessaloniki, all needing to be surveyed for traffic volumes, patterns, and movements.
To keep costs and deadlines in check, the team deployed a pair of affordable GoPro cameras (a main and a backup one) at each intersection and then uploaded the footage to GoodVision Video Insights. The videos were processed and ready for analysis in hours at a fraction of the cost required to collect and compile the data manually. The additional benefit for the team was the ability to run multiple analyses simultaneously, which helped drive results faster.
How to process large traffic datasets quickly?
7. Go beyond traffic counts
Traditional traffic counting methods are limited to, well, counting traffic. But even for simple counts, they often fail to capture pedestrian movement or distinguish between vehicle types. On the other hand, thanks to their visual nature, video analytics tools can do much more than just measure traffic volumes.
One example is assessing parking occupancy. 4-Traffic, our partner from the Netherlands, was approached by a real estate development firm to verify if their newest residential project had enough parking space. 4-Traffic deployed cameras that tracked the demand for 72 hours to collect reliable numbers of parked vehicles and cars leaving and entering the parking lot. Thanks to that, the developer knew exactly when the demand was the highest and optimised the parking lot for double use to accommodate both the residential complex and the nearby offices.
How did 4-Traffic evaluate parking capacity with video analytics?
And it’s not just vehicle volumes that can be counted. Video-based traffic analytics can also provide insight into pedestrian traffic patterns. Then, this knowledge can be used, for instance, to evaluate the commercial potential of an area. Or, like how our Danish partners from ATKI did in the town of Vejle to identify the optimal locations for mass events and understand how they would affect pedestrian and transportation flow across the town.
See how to optimise event venue location for pedestrian traffic
Write your own smart traffic success story
Now that you know the advantages smart traffic analytics offers, it’s your turn to make a move. Schedule a call or chat with us to hear more about GoodVision and become the protagonist of your own success story!