Optimized traffic flow on its roads
Slashed time that is taken to detect equipment issues
As one of the world’s largest toll road operators, Transurban builds and manages toll roads across the eastern seaboard of Australia, the United States and Canada. The Australian-owned company collects huge amounts of valuable data from its roads and since being introduced in 2016, Tableau has allowed it to go beyond the standard-data reporting tools into data analytics. Today, the firm can deep dive and explore its data assets to get greater insights into everything from what’s happening on its roads to accident hotspots and customer behaviour.
Now we’ve got tables with tens of billions of rows of data on our platform, which we use for our year-on-year analysis of traffic flow on any section of road.
Optimizing traffic on the roads
Transurban partners with governments to invest in new infrastructure and road upgrade projects—fast-tracking projects that will benefit motorists and communities. With magnetic sensors built into its roads at every 200-meter mark, in every lane, the company has access to volumes of data on traffic flow. Prior to Tableau, it looked over these numbers on a simple Excel spreadsheet, which could support only a limited number of rows of data. It was “impossible to do any analysis on Excel beyond half a day”, noted Michael. “But now we’ve got tables with tens of billions of rows of data on our platform, which we use for our year-on-year analysis of traffic flow on any section of road. We couldn't visualize and analyze all this information until now.” Using those insights, Transurban has also been able to pinpoint and monitor hotspots for accidents, while making subtle changes to those roads to improve safety.
Real-time information has enabled us to respond to equipment performance and technical issues in a much timelier manner and ensure tolling operations are running effectively.
Detecting roadside equipment issues with real-time information
For a toll road operator, the gantry is possibly the most important piece of roadside equipment as it plays a critical role in keeping the roads running efficiently.
To identify equipment that has malfunctioned or are starting to break down, Transurban now has access to information that is updated every hour, allowing it to address equipment problems much faster.
“Our roads operate 24/7, and there’s a significant amount of equipment required to keep the roads operating efficiently. Critical to this is our analytics platform, which ingests huge amounts near real-time data and provides operational dashboards on the status of our equipment across the nation,” Michael said.
“Real-time information has enabled us to respond to equipment performance issues in a much timelier manner and ensure tolling operations are running effectively.”