A platform measuring and displaying the increase in traffic congestion in the greater Boston area from 2012 to 2015 has been made public at this website. The platform is based on extensive traffic data provided by the Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization and research conducted under NSF support (see also this paper). The map shows data for every road segment in the Eastern Massachusetts network in 2012 and in 2015 and the comparative changes over these 3 years in terms of travel times and congestion. Congestion is measured as the fraction of time over the corresponding time period (shown at the top: Morning, Noon, etc) when a road segment is above its capacity. For a whole zip code region, these data are averaged over all road segments contained in this region. The website was developed by PhD student Salomón Wollenstein who presented the platform at the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI) Conference 2019 as part of a talk entitled “Data Visualization and routing of Connected Autonomous Vehicles” developed with the help of PhD student Arian Houshmand.
