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Analyse traffic routes to see how many vehicles take the main state road and how many use backstreets.
We want to understand how vehicles heading westbound along Sydney’s Anzac Bridge are getting to Lyons Road. Suburbs Russell Lea and Drummoyne are well-known rat-run sections as traffic banks across the bridge.
Let’s re-create this use case, and see where vehicles are going after crossing the Anzac Bridge.
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00:05
So I wanted to share another repeat use case which sort of centers around transport planning or traffic management. But a lot of, road owners, transport planners, they want to know where vehicles are actually moving in terms of their pathing, so that they can understand how they use sections of suburbs, roads, main roads, etc. This particular one is the Anzac Bridge heading westbound, from the city.
00:26
You can see over here and vehicles heading out on Victoria Road is the main arterial out to these two suburbs. This particular area has been known as a bit of a rat run section. So vehicles would be banked up on Victoria Road here as they come westbound over the harbor.
00:41
And then there's a whole bunch of little rat run options. They can use the Bay Run Road, that can use different roads through Drummonye here to get to Lyons Road and to get to some of these other suburbs, over here in this section. So how do we know where vehicles are rat running, when they're rat running, and, you know, in terms of percentages, how many are actually doing that? So using the Origin-Destination tool, I’ll just use the last month, we can certainly interrogate that further if we wanted. Just gonna use a linestring to highlight this section of the bridge because it's a bottleneck, right? Like all vehicles must go across the Victoria Road Bridge to get to this section. If you look at the bridge, I mean, three, four lanes, including a bus lane there. So all the traffic is coming along there.
01:18
But, if we want to sort of understand the rat running through this section, I think the best thing to do is use the free draw polygon tool, just to draw probably a shape around Lyons Road, rather than using a linestring because then it will capture whichever vehicles are sort of joining that section at whatever point. I'm also going to okay, so we'll let it run. Awesome. Also going to change it to mono so that we get a better sense of the pathing. We'll leave near-misses on if we want to know if there's any sort of particular conflict points.
01:47
That was nice and quick. So going back here, we can see that most vehicles, if they're heading to these suburbs, are doing the right thing. They're using the main road and we can see that by link distribution. Yeah, about 60% or so of trips are using the main state road.
02:02
Which is great, but we can see that there's, I guess a few vehicles are using these back streets. So 35%, are heading off to the left and then we've got, sort of a different. Yeah, 11% are using that Bay route, Bay Run Route. I mean, see where the rat running is happening, right? Even better, this section, though, if we were to have a look at the times of day so we can see that little bit of it’s happening as expected that afternoon peak where we're seeing the majority of vehicles.
02:30
Sorry, I’ll just click All. The majority of vehicles are really using that section, and where we’re most likely to have, some of that rat running happening. Hopefully that's useful.
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