New Report: Using Driving Data to Impact Transportation Policy

NYU Wagner Urban Planning Capstone students teamed up with Dash, the New York City connected car platform, to analyze the behavior of hundreds of New York City drivers -- and found a city full of speeders. Dash shared a sample of anonymized data — from its database of nearly 100 million miles of driving — with student researchers, giving them unprecedented insights into the behavior of New York City drivers on a granular level.

Some key findings from the analysis are:

● Speeding among drivers analyzed is most common along the Henry Hudson Parkway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, though the Belt Parkway,

Gowanus Parkway, and Brooklyn Queens Expressway also see a large number of speeders. (See Map 1, below)

● Hard braking events, which are connected to unsafe conditions for pedestrians and cyclists, are concentrated in downtown and midtown Manhattan, as well as Downtown Brooklyn. (See Map 2, below)

● 92% of drivers operating on 50 MPH streets late at night were driving above the posted speed limit.

The report’s findings have profound implications for urban transportation policy, especially when it comes to improving the understanding of how drivers interact with their built environments. The study found that drivers have a tendency to accelerate quickly between traffic calming infrastructure installations, like speed bumps, which can lead to dangerous situations for pedestrians. The real-time data has the potential to influence how the City penalizes drivers by allowing them to concentrate policing efforts in speeding hot spots. The data could also be a source of new revenue by allowing for the implementation of mileage fees for city drivers.

The full report can be downloaded here.

The Urban Planning Masters Degree students who authored the report are: Muhammad Daud, Ari Kaputkin, Rigel Jarabo, and Joanna Simon. The group's advisor was Sarah Kaufman, Assistant Director, NYU Rudin Center for Transportation.