West Lafayette — Spring marks the kickoff of construction season and you may wonder how engineers choose which projects get done first and why they need to be done in the first place.
WRTV learned Purdue University is using technology to give engineers a real time look at highway traffic and congestion.
“It monitors about 5% of the vehicles on Indiana roads or across the country,” Darcy Bullock, a civil engineering professor at Purdue University said.
Bullock and his team at Purdue University monitor traffic flows across the state and country.
This data comes from cars connected to the internet, like cars with navigation systems.
And it gives them important insight.
“From an engineering perspective it's nice to look at, kind of a system view as what are the trends on the highway over a day a week or a month and that helps us make investment decisions on where we want to improve infrastructure or make operational changes,” Bullock said.
For example, remember that winter storm we had right before Christmas?
They tracked the storm and traffic across the country along Interstate 70.
You can see in this video as the storm moves across from state-to-state traffic problems pop up.
“As engineers we want to make fact-based decision on infrastructure investments and improvements,” Bullock said.
Bullock said the information they get from vehicles is anonymous and completely private.
“Privacy is our top concern so I just want to emphasize this is consented anonymized data there's no way we can go back and track which vehicle was where, how fast they were going,” Bullock said.
On a typical day they record data from about 600,000 vehicles per minute just here in Indiana.
Across the country more than 25 million cars can be seenon their system.
