Helsinki Regional Transport Authority (HSL) has chosen Telia Crowd Insights to optimise connecting bus routes and measure the sustainability of the city’s €1.2bn (£1bn) West Metro subway extension.
The solution uses anonymised mobile network data to provide information on where crowds come from and go to at a particular time.
According to HSL, it was able to view how travellers used its existing bus services to form the basis for decision-making in order to re-plan the connections.
And immediately after the new services began to operate, HSL says it was able to see how traveller moving patterns changed.
Tapio Levä, senior business development manager for data insights in Finland, Telia, said: “Benefiting from the new data source and continuous data requires changing the way we operate.
“In the past, many organisations have based their operations on statistics that were updated once a year, for example, but now they have constantly updated data available on, in this case, the flow of people.”
The use of Telia Crowd Insights also made it possible for HSL to measure the new subway extension’s environmental impact. The data showed that subway use had reduced car traffic between the suburban city of Espoo and Helsinki by 8%, which equates to 13 tonnes of CO2 per day.
HSL now intends to use Telia Crowd Insights for public transport planning in all of their 15 regions.
