Are you trying to move your transportation project forward, but unsure where to begin? Without a wealth of clear, actionable commercial vehicle insights to support your plan, successful results could be in flux.
Set your next transportation initiative up for success by diving into a reliable freight data lake: A digital storehouse of aggregated commercial vehicle data. These expansive data pools enable you to support every decision your organization makes with real-world evidence of truck movement, stops and behaviors. However, simply having access to a freight data lake isn’t enough. You need to know where to find relevant insights within it and how to tether data exploration efforts to desired business goals.
Read this blog post to learn the best ways to navigate a freight data lake’s vastness. Plus, explore three impactful freight data use cases and discover what’s possible with Altitude’s commercial vehicle insights.
Who can benefit from exploring a freight data lake?
Whether your organization is in the public or private sector, poring through a freight data lake can help you develop smarter, more effective transportation strategies. Industries like these can benefit from extracting insights with commercial vehicle data:
A reliable and context-rich freight data lake offers extensive insights needed to understand your region’s commercial transportation patterns, and with clearer insight comes better decisions. Validate assumptions based on what real-world commercial vehicles are doing before making expensive investments or new policy proposals. Help your organization avoid poor project outcomes by building your plan on real-world data.
Navigating a freight data lake in five easy steps
Exploring the depths of a freight data lake may sound formidable, but by keeping your project’s objectives in focus, you can navigate its contents with ease. Extract only the insights that are most important and disregard irrelevant information using these key steps.
- Identify your organization’s goals: Clearly identify what the purpose of your project is and what success would look like. Are you looking to conduct a proper site selection analysis, develop traffic-calming strategies, improve commercial vehicle parking in your region, or something else? No matter the initiative, set an appraisable target from the beginning. This will make it easier to know what insights you’ll need to get there.
- Pinpoint knowledge gaps to get to your goal: Once you’ve outlined the objectives, you can begin identifying where knowledge gaps exist. Which commercial vehicle insights will be most valuable for reaching your organization’s desired outcome? This will help you determine the best ways to navigate the freight data lake you’ve chosen to explore.
- Select data categories most relevant to explore: Your freight data lake should have products or a solution that make surfacing specific insights easy. Determine which of these will be most beneficial to your analysis. Whether you’re interested in commercial parking data, movement patterns or total vehicle counts, knowing the key modules to access will help you easily filter through the expanse of data available and find what truly matters.
- Establish clear parameters: Once you’ve identified pertinent modules to make exploring your freight data lake easier, you should choose which parameters will help you go even deeper. Extract meaningful insights from your expansive data pool using highly specific criteria. For example, with Altitude by Geotab’s Stop Analytics module, you can not only find where commercial vehicles are stopping most often, but also where longer duration stops are occurring, which times are busiest for vehicle stops in your region and how trends between idle time and parked time are different. Use additional parameters like minutes stopped and distances moved to surface even more detailed insights.
- Begin your analysis: Having a clear plan to address what you don’t know, identifying the right modules and extracting necessary insights will help you efficiently navigate the extensive freight data available. Only analyze the most relevant insights to your goals and use them to guide your decision-making processes.
Enrich your transportation planning initiatives with aggregated mobility insights
Now that you know how to find valuable insights within your freight data lake, it’s important to understand how they can be used practically. Below, we’ve provided three quick use cases of how insights can transform your transportation initiatives, no matter your industry.
Site select with confidence: Whether you’re looking to smartly place new electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, a new warehouse or a new business location, let commercial vehicle insights shape your plan. Knowing the types of vehicles most commonly traveling throughout a region’s roads, where they’re headed and what their stopping tendencies are can help you position your next site for maximum usage.
Develop targeted traffic-calming strategies: Use surfaced insights to create proposals, policies or infrastructure enhancements that aim to relieve key traffic pinch points in your region’s transportation network. Enhance supply chain efficiency and road safety by using harsh event insights, trip times, vehicle volumes and more to accurately diagnose (and solve) regional traffic problems.
Enhance truck parking availability: If your freight data lake allows you to analyze specific truck parking zones and behaviors, look for patterns where parking is either overflowing or occurring in unauthorized areas (such as along highway shoulders). These key indicators can help you prove with data whether there’s a need for increased commercial vehicle parking options in your region and where the most severely impacted areas are.
These use cases are just three of the many ways that surfacing deep commercial vehicle insights can help you accomplish specific transportation goals. And with Altitude, our context-rich freight data lake, you can transform your planning approach with insights that span across 99.9% of primary and 84.8% of secondary North American roadways.
Make the dive with Altitude by Geotab
With Altitude, plunge into an ocean of rich freight insights that offer unparalleled context. Quickly access what matters most to you by filtering aggregated commercial vehicle data by vehicle class, type, vocation and more through our platform’s capabilities. Additionally, use our platform to study transportation insights in distinct areas and along specific road segments for even more granular analysis.
Bring a trove of actionable information to the surface with Altitude’s detailed and ultra-reliable insights. We are the primary primary source and processor of our mobility data, providing vetted, anonymized transportation analytics you can trust. Through our six core products, unlock the actionable insights you need:
If you’re searching for a comprehensive freight data lake that makes detailed analysis easy, consider Altitude. Contact us today to learn more about how our platform can help you accomplish specific transportation use cases and achieve success.