Since the Car Drive Project focuses on using the car drive data to contribute in social good, we were studying the available sample data, and discussing on the possible questions over the last week. The main focus of our team was to come up with the questions that could be studied according to the available data fields, and discuss how answering these questions can help to make useful decisions to improve the social good. The following is the three areas that we believe can be studied according to our data, and how each can improve our society.
Severe Weather Traffic
Severe weather usually has significant influence to the traffic which could have an negative impact to the safety of people on road. One example is that the snow storm in Jan 2014 brought Atlanta to standstill. Traffic were frozen; over 1000 car accidents happened; many people were stuck on the way home.
We propose to study the relationship between weather condition and total traffic / accidents / traffic; with these general traffic information, we can then focus on different individuals and study their driving habits under different weather conditions. The goal is to provide information to estimate the traffic and to suggest whether changing driving habits is a good idea.
To realize this study, we need 1. weather and accident data, 2. quantifying the traffic, 3. to detecting routes choices of people. We already did some preliminary research and found out these aspects are realizable with reasonable efforts.
Fuel economy
A car consumes 453 gallons on average per year [1]; the 180 million car means more than 80 billions of gas consumed every year. Studies have shown that a good driving habit could help reduce the gas consumption by 5 ~ 33% [2]. We would like to study the relationship between gas consumption and driving habit. The driving habit can be captured by the speeds and the engine RPM. The goal is to quantify how driving habits impact the fuel economy for different car model and year and promote good driving habit for the environmental good.
Study the Driver’s’ Behavior
According to our Car Drive data, we have the driving speed records of each driver and also the time duration for each speed. For example, we know that at the Trip ID 10, the driver was driving with the speed of 96-100 MPH for 850 seconds. We believe that combining this data with the time of the starting and ending the trip can help us study the behaviour of the drivers during weekday versus weekends or night versus day. Also, by using the GPS data for the starting and ending point of the trips, we can get a visualization for the areas in the city that higher speeds have been detected. So, by knowing the areas of the city that have more probability for speed violation and the time of this possibility, it would be easier to detect traffic violations and reducing the dangerous driving to help the social good.
[1] http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/showtext.cfm?t=ptb0208
[2] https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/driveHabits.jsp
[3] Source of Fuel Economy picture: http://fmwaweru.blogspot.com/2012/08/7-driving-habits-to-save-on-fuel-and.html
[4] Source of snow traffic picture:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/freak-southern-snow-storm-strands-8000-students/story?id=22279318
[5] Source of Driver’s Behavior picture:
http://www.wral.com/dot-to-raise-speed-limit-on-triangle-highways/12916821/