Brief description of the organization
Providing engineering, environmental, advisory, architecture, digital and construction services for over 97 years, with over 12,000 employees worldwide.
Problem area
Transportation planning and investment decisions often rely on established data sources such as traffic counts, travel surveys, collision records, and transit ridership data. New and underused data sources may offer additional insight into travel patterns, safety risks, mobility barriers, and infrastructure needs. However, municipalities and transportation agencies need to understand the reliability, limitations, privacy considerations, and practical value of these data before incorporating them into planning and investment decisions.
This project will explore how an emerging or novel transportation data source, potentially combined with an innovative analytical approach, can provide a new understanding of transportation behaviour and help inform future mobility, infrastructure, or road-safety investments.
Main objectives
- Identify an emerging, novel, or underused data source that could improve understanding of transportation behaviour or network performance.
- Assess how the selected data could complement conventional transportation datasets and existing planning methods.
- Develop and demonstrate an analytical approach for translating the data into meaningful transportation insights.
Scope of work
- Conduct a literature review- Review current research and leading practices related to emerging transportation data, travel-pattern analysis, mobility analytics, road safety, and data-informed infrastructure planning.
- Define a transportation question- Select a specific issue or mode of transportation for analysis. Potential focus areas could include micromobility, pedestrian or cycling activity, road safety, campus travel, transportation equity, network accessibility, or changing travel patterns.
- Identify and assess a new data source- Select an emerging, novel, or underused dataset that could provide insight into the chosen transportation question. Assess its availability, structure, quality, representativeness, privacy implications, limitations, and potential value.
- Develop an analytical methodology- Design an approach for processing, analyzing, mapping, or visualizing the selected data. Where appropriate, compare or integrate the new data with conventional sources such as traffic counts, collision data, infrastructure inventories, or travel surveys.
- Apply the methodology to a case study- Test the approach using a defined geographic area or transportation network. Potential case-study partners could include the Town of Caledon or the City of Guelph. Alternatively, the University of Waterloo campus or a comparable institutional setting could provide a focused study area.
Deliverables
- Report
- Presentation
- Resources
Team meeting frequency
Weekly
Skills and training required
Research and analytical skills, presentation skills
Resources required
Desktop research
NDA or a commercialization agreement for this project?
Yes