L.A. Metro Opens Access to Data Tool

Regional Integration of Intelligent Transportation Systems (RIITS) and Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (L.A. Metro) regional travel patterns data platform, Measure Up! LOCUS, is now updated with new datasets from 2021-2022 and is open for use by all government agencies, their private partners (including consultants), and academic institutions, according to L.A. Metro's news release. 

With this release, four consecutive years of passenger travel data (2019-2022) are available through the program, allowing users to extract travel trends with spatial, modal, equity, and other trip attributes. 

“Government agencies and researchers often have limited resources and data to conduct analyses that are critical to understanding how communities live and move,” said Anurag Komanduri, vice president of Cambridge Systematics (CS). “By offering access to a high-quality data product at no cost, L.A. Metro is empowering agencies across L.A. County with data insights that will be critical to improving transit, sustainability, safety, and goods movement for all of L.A. County’s citizens, especially disadvantaged communities.”

L.A. Metro, RIITS, Measure Up!, and CS teamed up earlier this year to launch Measure Up! LOCUS, a set of interactive data dashboards to provide insight on travel patterns in the L.A. region.

In addition to the passenger travel data, the program also offers goods movement truck travel data obtained from the regional heavy-duty truck model (HDT) in 2019 via interactive dashboard tools. 

The new 2021-2022 passenger dataset is provided through LOCUS, Cambridge Systematics’ big data platform, and free licenses to access the newly updated tool are available through L.A. Metro.

What Measure Up! LOCUS Offers

Measure Up! LOCUS allows users to:

• Analyze granular travel patterns by travel mode (walk, bike, transit, auto), equity communities, time of day and day of week, travel purpose, and trip distance, at a Neighborhood and Block Group level for each of the four years of data
• View year-over-year travel pattern trends between 2019 and 2022 at a Neighborhood level
• Extract top origin-destination pairs for different travel markets (for example, commute trips)
• Assess heavy-duty goods movement by vehicle class, time of day, and origin-destination geographies (Neighborhoods and Block Groups) for model year 2019
• Examine the impact of COVID on commuting patterns at a Neighborhood level in 2019 and 2020

The data is obtained through passenger travel information from anonymized, location-based services data from smartphones, supplemented with transit farecard and ridership data (APC, ridership from regional providers) and Equity-focus Communities (EFC) data from L.A. Metro. 

In addition to the passenger flows, a new goods movement tool for 2021 developed using truck GPS data will also be released.