Data to support the delivery of the City Deal

OVERVIEW

The Greater Cambridge Partnership (GCP) is delivering the City Deal for Cambridge, which supports the delivery of 44,000 new jobs and 33,500 new homes by 2031 by addressing some the key challenges to development and helping to improve the quality of life for residents. Transport is a key challenge, and delays on car journeys can affect bus journeys, making them slow and unreliable. The GCP is making significant investments in transport infrastructure to support travellers in making more sustainable choices, such as travelling by bus, bike or walking. 

At the heart of this work is the gathering of data. Data gathered by sensors around the city helps us to understand how people move around the city and informs the schemes we develop, the business cases we put together and any modelling that’s needed. It also helps us to monitor and evaluate the impact of our and other local authority traffic schemes and how investments made have shifted behaviours. 

CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS:

• Quality of Data: The way we had been collecting data wasn’t giving us the granularity we needed, and we were not able to accurately identify the many different classifications of vehicles, and importantly for us, how many travellers were walking or were on wheels (bikes, scooters etc).
• Deploying New Technology: We worked with VivaCity to overcome the challenges of deploying new technology, working with third-party infrastructure providers to enable sensors to be mounted on street lighting, ensuring that vegetation didn’t overhang the sensors and that the count lines were in the right place. 
• Bespoke Procurement:  The procurement was designed to have two sections - the first was a straight procurement of count data at several specified sites, including which classifications we needed. The second was a framework that would allow us and partners to procure further sensors to add into the network as and when needed, without having to go through a further procurement exercise.

SUCCESSES:

• Innovative Collaboration and Procurement: The project needed a new way to collect data. Three former University of Cambridge students were building a start-up using computer vision sensors powered by machine learning to collect better transport data. We collaborated with them on a small-scale pilot which demonstrated the capabilities and proved out the technology. We then procured two further small trials, one through an open competition and another utilising a government framework, both built on the initial trial but were still early-stage demonstrators.
• Development of New Insights: Following the procurement, we now have access to much more granular data that shows us many more classifications than we had before, including new modes such as electric scooters and pedestrians, which previous legacy equipment weren’t capable do collecting. 
• Improved Business Cases: The new data allows us to refine business cases, and the ease of deployment and data analysis has meant that the data culture within our organisation has changed. We’re becoming much more data-driven, with project managers on infrastructure projects deploying sensors to evaluate the impact of investments being made and using that evidence in future requests for funding.
• Benefits for Communities: The data we’re collecting is being shared through our open-data platform, Cambridgeshire Insights, so it can be used by local communities. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Early engagement with the market to help shape a procurement for innovative products is vital.
• Data handling It can be difficult to validate, analyse and draw intelligence and insight from large amounts of data, so we developed a new data platform to facilitate this.
• Collaboration Close collaborative work with an innovation partner is important to help products and services to evolve as needed to help solve any challenges that arise as the work continues. 
• Communication of the technology and the benefits is crucial to get buy in from the rest of the organisation.
• Understanding the market. We now have an at-scale deployment which includes 106 sensors. For this deployment, we went through several procurement steps, including soft market testing to understand the market and the technologies that are available. We worked with the market to ensure specifications were right and to realise the risks we should be aware of. We then developed an output/outcome spec which was technology agnostic.

CONCLUSION AND NEXT STEPS:

The procurement of the sensor network provided a platform for our recent work with VivaCity on Smart Signal Control. This new project is looking at how better detection, more granular data and the use of AI could help us to better manage our road network and give priority to more sustainable modes of travel. We’re also exploring with VivaCity other potential uses for their network and data, meaning we’re constantly getting more value out of our initial investment.