Signalized Intersection Locations of Walnut Creek Traffic Signals.
Public government agencies have a significant opportunity to improve efficiency, increase transparency and reduce workloads for employees by proactively releasing public data and making it open to all. Data that is open, free, and easily accessible has the potential for insights not easily realized in siloed non-digital formats.
The Traffic Engineering field deals with large generators of data that can be considered for opening up to the public. Sources for these traffic data can be from static and dynamic elements of a traffic network. This includes locations of static fixed objects like traffic signal poles and traffic cabinets or dynamic elements such as vehicle volumes or signal timing parameters. Transit, connected and autonomous vehicles, digital maps, Fiber network design, ATSPM’s or network modeling are a few potential transportation-related categories to benefit from traffic-related open data sources. Their are multiple saftey and Vision Zero checks that can be performed including distance checks between signals to ensure Programmed Visibility signal heads are used or coordinated signal timing.
The City of Walnut Creek, CA has released its first traffic related open dataset. This is a simple static dataset for intersection location information for all 100 signalized intersections the City operates and maintains. This data is available in a machine-readable GeoJSON format. GeoJSON stores geographical and non-spatial information using structural data. This GeoJSON Open Data includes latitude, longitude, and elevations locations as points for the center of the intersection and stores additional feature data properties such as street names as well as City-specific ID numbers of each traffic signal. This dataset is made freely available on the internet and is a small first step towards making Traffic Engineering data more open and easily accessible.