TfL hackathon showed data can keep transport running and people safe

Analytics is about the journey AND destination

By Danny Bradbury 18 Sep 2017 at 13:19

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Sponsored If software is eating the world, then hackathons are its fast-food restaurants. Groups of developers come together for short periods to try to solve pressing problems. This happens in sectors from healthcare to retail, and now it’s happening in transportation too.

London, the UK’s capital, is a city groaning under its own weight. Its road network supports roughly 21 million trips each day, accounting for around 80 per cent of all trips in the city, according to Transport for London, the local government body that manages its transport network. Buses carry 6.5 million people each day, picking their way around 500,000 roadwork jobs each year.

Things are getting more challenging over time. There will be around 10 million people in the city by 2030, up from around 8.6 million in 2015, travelling on road and tube systems built years ago to cope with far lower traffic volumes. In 25 years, the system will have to support another five million daily trips, warns Lauren Sager-Weinstein, TfL’s chief data analyst.

TfL has turned to analytics to solve the problem and spends a lot of its time gathering data and turning it into useful insights.

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