What is an Origin-Destination Study?

Origin-destination studies serve as a foundation for transportation planning and are essential to understanding traffic patterns. O-D studies look at where vehicles are coming from, where they are going, why people are traveling, when the trips occur, and what types of vehicles are traveling. Quality Counts offers several different types of origin-destination studies, all with their own unique advantages.

BLUEMAC BLUETOOTH O-D

By strategically deploying Bluetooth sensors throughout a survey area, MAC addresses from Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, and WiFi-enabled devices are recorded and processed to develop O-D, travel time and speed reports among sensor locations. Each device’s path is tracked through the survey area based on the progression of sensors that pick up the signal-emitting device. The resulting data is viewable in real-time on a cloud-based web portal. Period and Threshold filters allow users to narrow data down to specific times, days, and travel speeds, allowing both a holistic and per-mode view of data. This approach is best suited for medium-scale O-D studies where analyzing several days or weeks of traffic patterns for a few possible routes is required.

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BIG DATA SURVEYS

O-D analytics software providers pull historical, anonymized data from location-based apps and GPS-navigation services and process that data to produce O-D matrices and travel time data. The data typically spans several months or years in order to have a large enough sample size for sufficient analysis. When paired with contextual information, this type of survey has the power to delve deep into travel patterns. Tourist trips can be isolated from commuter trips, passenger and commercial vehicles can be viewed separately, and travel patterns for different demographics can be compared. There are several products on the market today that offer big data O-D surveys including Moonshadow, Streetlight, and Airsage. Due to lower sample rates, these studies are best suited for large-scale efforts that are city or region-wide. They’re also good for studies where there are dozens of possible routes to be analyzed, exceeding the capacity of a limited number of BlueMAC units or license plate cameras.

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LICENSE PLATE STUDIES

Our team has dozens of high-definition cameras capable of capturing license plate data with ease. Processing is completed either manually or through a semi-automated application depending on the complexity of the schema, but the end result is similar. By time-stamping license plates as they pass camera locations, we are able to provide exact origin-destination and travel time data among sets of locations that include all trips and roadway users for a given time-frame. This approach is best suited for projects where counting all trips is ideal, such as assessing cut through traffic. It can also be more cost-effective over the other two methods when only a few routes need to be analyzed. Our team can also tie license plates to specific vehicle classifications, resulting in richer datasets to address problematic commercial vehicle travel patterns.

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No two O-D projects QC faces are the same. Each one has its own unique problems, often requiring one or more collection methods to fully assess the challenges engineers are facing. If you’re thinking about including an origin-destination study in your next project, we encourage you to reach out to one of our team members to discuss your challenges and address the pros, cons, and pricing of each O-D approach.

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