Visualization of large data sets for project planning and prioritization on transportation corridors

Transportation planners address mobility, accessibility, safety, environment, and economic development on thousands of miles of multimodal corridors. Improvement projects are periodically implemented with input from diverse public stakeholders. Various performance metrics and data visualization are used to identify and prioritize locations of the projects. An agency has needs for business processes to identify opportunities and threats, potential cost savings, and programming conflicts across hundreds of acquisition projects in transportation systems. This paper describes supporting data, analytics, and prioritization to aid the planning of improvement projects. The approach includes design of an algorithm to extract relevant data from multiple databases to a single file that can be imported to a data visualization software application, Tableau. Tableau is used to provide an interface for visualization of a six-year improvement program of several billion dollars. The results help transportation planners at several levels of the agency to make data-driven decisions in project planning. Customizing Tableau data interfaces enables the visualization and prioritization of projects considering metrics such as project status, bridge condition, pavement condition, crashes per vehicle-miles traveled, etc. Prior to this work, the agency relied on a program in which users query the status of individual road segments. The lessons learned include how to approach data security while providing flexibility and utility to a variety of users, how to ensure that the interfaces are robust to missing or inaccurate data, and how to account for potential cognitive bias of analysts and decision makers.