Real-time data for better informed transport and parking choices

This project will use Willoughby City Council’s (WCC) Chatswood central business district as a living laboratory promoting the effective use of data to improve visitor experience. The initial focus will be on parking with the intention to aggregate fragmented datasets managed by government, industry, and community data custodians, making them accessible to Council’s stakeholders including residents, businesses, workers, and visitors.

Achieving real-time data sharing between these parties will enable commuters to make better and more efficient decisions, thereby addressing congestion and optimising transport network usage.

A demonstration application will be created to visualise elements of this information encouraging activity from both users and the software development community. In addition, a local transport data community will be developed, with appropriate privacy and sharing policies to protect the rights of participants and the community.

Insights derived from this project will be shared with other councils to build capability across the sector.

Participants

• • Willoughby City Council
  • University of NSW
  • Astrolabe Group

Project background

WCC is keen to better inform its residents, businesses, workers and visitors on how to move to and through the Chatswood CBD, in doing so improving experiences and empowering stakeholders to make more informed and efficient transport choices.

The project will make data more accessible and usable, create an open source tool as a demonstration project on how the data can be used and foster the development of a local data community to continue to build on this work in the future.

WCC is supported by Local Government NSW (LGNSW) in this project, with LGNSW focused on capacity-building research that can be scaled across the local government sector. It is intended that the outcomes of this project will be shared with other local councils.

Project objectives

• Understanding what data is available to Council and its stakeholders to better inform multiparty decision-making.
• Creation of an environment where fragmented data from multiple stakeholders can be brought together and analysed, offering meaningful insights to Council’s stakeholders.
• Sharing project findings to build capacity right across the local government sector.