Behaviour Data on Public Roads
The Norwegian Public Roads Administration: NPRA (Statens vegvesen) provides a smart and continuous road transport system for all of Norway.
Their goal is to secure safe roads designed for future needs.
Case Study Details
- ClientNorwegian Public Roads Administration
- LocationNorway
- Year2020
The Challenge
To be a leading actor, and to offer their customers quality services, the NPRA needs to understand Norwegian travel habits and behaviour.
Traditionally they have conducted national surveys and a 20-minute phone interview. The respondent’s answers would be based on their recollection of their travels done the previous day. This method was both economically and practically challenging, as well as time consuming. It was also difficult to get the younger population segments to answer. In general, this way of conducting surveys also provided a limited number of answers.
The results of the surveys have a direct impact on national projects and major investments, such as the national transport plans within the Norwegian state budget. In addition to investments and improvement of motorways, roads, train tracks, it also affects other public transport offerings, as well as legislation and regulations.
The NPRA required optimal datasets to to attain important details and see a complete picture of transport offering and usage.
Increasing Precision & Impact
By using data generated by Kogenta technology, we were able to increase the precision and geographical field of impact, along with travel form and other value-adding data for the NRPA. Our data is based on user consent, along with up-to-date user privacy regulations. This provides new opportunities for analysis, as well as a method that is cost and time effective.
We divided the selected solution into two categories:
– Understanding the travellers movements before, during and after using public transport
– Understanding the different means of transport used by the travellers (walking, bus, bicycle, other vehicles)
As a part of the NRPA project we also looked at traffic to, from and within Lillehammer city, in cooperation with Innlandstraffikk and their ticket app. The app-users have given consent to share data on form of travel, which gives the NPRA knowledge of whether the users are walking, riding a bike, driving a car or using a bus/train in the different areas around Lillehammer.
“We need good data about the traffic and travel patterns in our county and on our road network. This project gives us the opportunity to take part in new thinking and innovation to find out what we can use mobile data to achieve. This is innovation in practice: education and an important step towards getting the best possible data by the most efficient methods possible.”
Rich Detail, Priceless Insights
The data has proved very valuable for the NPRA in understanding travel patterns both on a higher level with a large number of journeys, but even more importantly on a much more detailed level than other sources had been and are able to deliver.
The Kogenta data also provided insights into how people used different ways of transport, giving the NPRA insight into the population’s habits and use of different transport which was not readily available to them earlier.
“Every day we move – cellphones in hand. Anonymous mobile data can therefore give us access to large amounts of data that can be used to describe movements. Transport planning and planning of measures are qualitatively strengthened by using mobile data to estimate the effects of various priorities and measures.”
