Planning Louisiana's Bridges with Big Data

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• How to evaluate big data’s applicability to specific transportation projects, and especially to bridge planning
• How to distill big data into information for public consumption
• How to identify big data’s limitations in measuring travel patterns

MORE SESSION DETAILS

In Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana, the Mississippi River isolates pockets of these communities from key destinations, making bridge-building a critical planning objective. Today, location data from mobile devices (“big data”) offers new and better tools for bridge planning. Big data helps planners empirically measure travel behavior at macro and micro scales: It reveals where bridges are most needed and helps planners forecast their impact. However, this resource is so new that best practices for using it are emerging. Hear how Louisiana-based transportation planners and big data experts defined these best practices for two recent bridge-related projects. The first is an environmental assessment of the New Orleans Metropolitan Area’s Florida Avenue Bridge, where economic development and potential increases in truck activity are major concerns. The panelists will then turn to Baton Rouge, where big data is one of many tools being used to assess building a new bridge to cross the Mississippi River. They will conclude with a discussion of their unique observations made via big data, and how the data can be distilled into visualizations and actionable insights.