Hot Wheels: Why Heatmaps Are A Policymaker’s Dream
One of the most powerful tools at a policymaker’s disposal is the historical data that illustrates which areas were most used by micromobility vehicles, and we’re proud to introduce three new heatmaps that do just that.
Accessible on the Map tab within our product, City Conductor, these engaging visualizations reflect where vehicles traveled, where they began and ended trips, and where they were deployed and rebalanced—all at a variety of different scales and in customizable time ranges.
Travel Heatmaps for Improving Safety
The Travel Heatmap visualizes common routes taken by micromobility vehicles. By clicking on a hexagonal cell, the user can see the count of unique trips that have passed through in the selected time range. This can help inform improvements to the bike lane network, by helping city staff either identify critical gaps, or by determining safety interventions—such as a sharrow upgrading to a buffered lane—that can help riders feel secure enough to stay off the sidewalk. In other words, this map can help keep micromobility riders safe from cars, and pedestrians safe from micromobility vehicles.
Trip Start / End Heatmaps for Sustainability Progress
Visualizing where trips have historically begun and ended can help cities identify areas for program expansion at a variety of scales, from whole zip codes to neighborhoods to individual street parking spaces. By understanding these popular origins and destinations, analysts and planners can determine locations for new parking corrals, docking stations, or drop zones for dockless vehicles—an important component for enabling residents to choose micromobility over cars for some journeys, and making progress toward the city’s sustainability goals. In fact, one of Lacuna’s customers recently used this new heatmap to check the estimates on the amount of micromobility parking they’d need for a project—and happily discovered that they actually needed three times as much!
Operator Drop-off Heatmaps for Measuring Equity
This map helps cities measure the success of policies designed to improve equity and reduce transit deserts. City staff can visualize the locations where operators deploy and rebalance their vehicles both before and after the policy went into effect, and compare the two. If there is no meaningful change, the policy may need to be optimized for stronger incentives and/or enforcement in order to encourage desirable behavior from operators.
City Conductor’s heatmaps help cities prioritize policy and physical infrastructure changes, and measure their impact—using data to tell stories that inspire progress to safety, sustainability, and equity.
Contact us for a demo today and learn how we can give you more visibility into your city streets, as well as what to do with that visibility to improve your policy outcomes.
