Cut-through traffic? ODIQ to the rescue🚨!

Municipalities often ask us for objective data: travel times, bottlenecks and Origin-Destination analysis. The most common question is related to identifying cut-through traffic. That’s why… drumroll 🥁 we have added a new feature to the ODIQ platform, called the ‘Branching Analysis’.

As you might know, cut-through traffic is a major issue for cities and municipalities. When the main roads get crowded during rush hour, drivers choose all sorts of different routes: through the city centre or suburban areas. This causes significant nuisance, some examples are:

• Traffic jams within the city

• Excessive speed

• Potential conflicts in narrow streets

• Noise and air pollution

Traffic insights at your disposal

For your mobility service it is important to understand why people take different routes at different times of the day and why on that day specifically. That’s where Geo Mobility steps in! We are more than capable of giving insights in the matter above.

How do you set up a Branching analysis?

• You select a starting and end point eg. from one side of the city to the other.

• Select the branching analysis

• You select the period, the hours of the day and the time interval (how often you want an update).

• That’s it!

An example of the results

We will briefly explain how the tool works through a case in Brussels:

There are six different routes recommended by Google Maps during the selected period. As you can see on the map, blue is the intended route, but red is the most effective one. Google Maps recommends driving right through the heart of Brussels (green route) 26% of the time during the evening rush hour. Why?

Because in this way, the driver avoids heavy traffic on the main road. As a result a lot of potential conflicts occur in the residential area. Based on these insights, cities can respond to complaints from their residents or evaluate and adjust the existing circulation plan based on objective data rather than their gut feeling.