About Speed Data
There are a range of use cases where speed data is a valuable input for both managing construction activity and improving road network performance.
This article quickly touches on three of the most common types of speed data and how these relate to different use cases.
If you have a use case that requires speed but you're unsure where to start, reach out to the team at Mooven, who can help you determine the best approach.
Common Data Sources and Use Cases
Floating vehicle data (live)
Floating vehicle data provides live average speed data and can be used to track how speeds change over time, for example, how temporary traffic management has impacted speed.
Data is gathered from connected vehicles and devices. It provides a quick and efficient way to understand speed on most roads.
Common safety use cases include:
Informing temporary traffic management design based on actual not posted speeds.
Identifying the riskiest speed locations or worksites to drive evidence-based interventions.
Validating the effectiveness of temporary traffic management or speed mitigation measures.
Common performance use cases:
Understand congestion patterns and where standstill traffic is occurring.
Measuring road performance.
Not suited useful for:
Understanding speed distributions
Measuring lane level speeds on multilane roads
Telematics
There are a range of telematics providers that offer vehicle-level data feeds. These providers typically have dedicated units installed within vehicles or direct connections to the onboard telemetry data. Some providers have stronger coverage within private fleets, while others are almost exclusively focused on heavy vehicles.
While this data provides a richer picture of individual speeds, this data needs to be extracted after the fact and only relates to a sample of vehicles (typically under 20% per provider).
Common safety use cases include:
Understanding speed disruptions for safety reviews and audits, summarising data over a period of time.
Measuring the impact of speed zone changes and adherence to new speed limits.
Where a sample of vehicles can be used, this provides a useful option that doesn't involve putting workers in harm's way to collect data and can be more easily deployed over much larger areas.
Roadside Hardware
Roadside hardware is the best solution where a complete picture of every vehicle's speed is required. The level of accuracy and information is dependent on the type of hardware.
Traffic tube counters
Pneumatic road tubes are rubber tubes that get laid across a road to count the number of passing vehicles. As each vehicle drives over the tube, air gets pushed into a counting unit. Where parallel tubes are laid, speed can be inferred from this data.
This is the most cost-effective hardware solution but the least accurate. Data is typically collected for a week.
Telematics Sites
Dedicated in-ground sensors are used to measure the volume and speed of passing vehicles, often seen on freeways and motorways.
If one of these sensors is located at a point of interest, they are a great source of information.
Mobile speed radar
Temporary units that can be set up by construction crews to capture vehicle speeds. These provide an easy solution for gathering individual vehicle speeds for a single lane of traffic.
While effective for gathering temporary information for a fixed point, they do require people to be put in harm's way to deploy and can be impacted by setup mistakes.
Fixed radar units:
Devices that are normally permanently mounted to monitor traffic volumes and speeds across multiple lanes of traffic. These units provide reliable point speed data and are not impacted by weather or light.
Radar units are most frequently used on freeways and motorways but can be installed in construction zones if the business case justifying the additional expense of hardware installation and management.