“One does not need to share all the illusions of the boosters to believe, as I believe, that that most fantastic city in the world will one day exist in this region: a city embracing the entire region from the mountains to the sea.” -- Carey McWilliams

Autonomous_Transportation_Analyzer

The goal of this repo is to build a tool to analyze autonomous transportation options in Los Angeles and the larger Southern California region. Initial plan is to focus on freeway trips, both a core ecology of Los Angeles and golden opportunity for AV deployments.

Phase one of the project involves integrating disparate transporation data sources. An initial inventory is listed in the Resources section below.

Phase two involves developing an analytical methodology to model the impact of different AV scenarios on average trip time, traffic volume, and other key metrics across the region.

Phase three involves developing a decision support visualization tool to enable scenario planning with municipal managers across the Southern California region.

• What questions will this project help answer?

  • What would be the impact of dedictating two lanes on every freeway across Southern California to autonomous vehicle ("AV") bus rapid transit ("BRT") (or perhaps, better named, software trains)?
    • What freeway corridors would be best suited for an initial deployment of AV BRT lanes?
  • What would be the impact of 5%, 15% or X% adoption of a subscription based private autonomous vehicle network?
  • Other focused questions?

• Resources.

  • VISION -- Bloomberg Philanthropies' autonomous vehicle primer
  • VISION -- Autonomous vehicle scenario analysis from Bits & Atoms
  • PLAN -- Los Angeles City's "Transportation Technology Strategy for the City of LA"
  • DATA -- California Dept of Transportations (CalTrans) traffic volumes
  • DATA -- US Census Commuter Flows
  • DATA -- CalTrans GIS data
  • DATA -- other creative sources! Perhaps via a creative data collaborative partnership with private companies like Uber, Lyft, Waze
  • TOOL -- NYC Congesting Pricing Excel Spreadsheet for Inspiration