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.

Project wrap-up

This project has been completed, and below is a summary of its outcomes.

Congestion in local centres can cost local communities many millions of dollars in lost productivity, car running costs and vehicle exhaust emissions.

By enabling better informed community choices we can:

• Reduce the reliance on private motor vehicles and improve use of public transport, shared transport and active transport
• Reduce emission related pollution and improve the attractiveness of local centres promoting visitation and local commerce
• Communicate congestion and capacity constraints to encourage those who have flexibility in movement options to avoid problem areas and times
• Develop a data driven approach to transport planning, regulatory reform and investment to support the implementation of future-focussed technologies such as electric vehicle charging stations, autonomous vehicle zones, shared and on demand transport.

This pilot project focussed on the Chatswood CBD, and was named Move My Way. The work resulted in the creation of open source, real-time data catalogue and analytics toolkit that will be made available to the community, businesses, software developers and researchers to develop products and services to promote better transport choices.

The University of NSW has developed a data portal called City Data, for researchers across Australia.for storing and visualising datasets regarding transport, parking and other relevant sectors from the stakeholders.

For this project the datasets included:

• Walkability Index of Chatswood CBD (Combined and for each aspect – shops, parking etc.)
• Parking Occupancy Index Chatswood CBD
• Footpaths in Willoughby City Council (WCC)
• Pedestrian throughfares
• Parking meter history
• Locations of off-street car parks in Chatswood
• Parking meters location
• Chatswood CBD boundary
• Bicycle routes and Cycle racks in WCC
• Concourse carpark occupancy rate
• Bicycle network in WCC
• WCC parking infringement report
• Traffic and Pedestrian Counts in Chatswood

Initial focus was 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 more efficient decisions thereby addressing congestion and optimising transport network usage.

A demonstration application was created to visualise elements of this information encouraging activity from both users and the software development community. 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.