A variety of undergraduates, graduates and professionals meet each week in Margery Reed to improve Denver transit in cooperation with TomTom, the municipalities of Denver, and Denver South Transportation Management Association.
The project is supervised by Adjunct Professor Jim Ducay, and advised by Denver South representative Daniel Hutton. The goal of the group is to use data from GPS and transportation giant TomTom to improve public transport in Denver, specifically for the Denver Tech Center (DTC).
“They [TomTom] were looking for a place to validate and test some of their data tools,” said Hutton. “And with these big bulk data tools, you can start to draw heat maps of where people are coming from and going to [in Denver]. That helps with designing transportation systems.”
The group is using the data from TomTom to address the traffic congestion in Denver. According to graduate student Matt Hugel, “We can track the number of cars and commute times between specific origination and destination points that can then be used to analyze traffic patterns.”
Their work has the potential to increase worker productivity, the city’s GDP and to decrease Denver’s carbon footprint. Senior analytics student Garrett Sherman said, ”It does involve reducing emissions, it does involve reducing traffic.”
The group is analyzing the data and presenting their findings to the municipalities monthly, so that they can help create solutions. They have discussed the possibility of self-driving shuttles, new light rail stops and smart traffic lights.
Graduate student Stephen VanVladricken Jr. is excited about addressing the first and last mile for public transit users stating that “38 percent of employees who drive to their jobs in the DTC would use the light rail system if a free shuttle bus was available, this is an opportunity for us.”
Ducay points out that this data would also help ensure the safety of pedestrians, “The cameras are able to pick up and detect if you are a pedestrian or a car, so that if you step out there [into the road] the light would automatically change.”
They hope to do all this good by giving the city a better idea of where public transport and smart technology are needed. The project is ongoing, and the impact of it will take a while to be felt by the people of Denver, but thanks to the partnership between DU, Denver South Transportation Management Association and Denver municipalities, transportation looks like it will improve.
