THE ORLANDO-ORANGE COUNTY EXPRESSWAY AUTHORITY'S TRAFFIC DATA COLLECTION PILOT PROJECT

The initial purpose of this study was to determine the feasibility of utilizing E-PASS toll transponder transaction data gathered from the Orlando-Orange County Expressway Authority's (the Authority) electronic toll collection system to derive real-time travel times across the Authority's 90-mile network of limited-access expressways. The Authority's motivation to explore this possibility was spurred by a number of factors, including: the need for near-term, low-cost data collection as identified in the Authority's ITS Master Plan; emerging opportunities to effectively disseminate traveler information to Authority customers and Information Service Providers (ISPs) that will serve to fill the "data gap" between traveler information currently available and that sought by private users; and potential benefits of using probe data to support traffic management and operations objectives (including improved traffic control, incident management, and the support of transportation planning functions). In addition to providing confirmation that the Authority's Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI) data collection system can be utilized to produce travel time and speed data, another motivation has been to provide the Authority with an innovative systems engineering-based methodology for more accurately determining the design requirements necessary to develop a permanent Expressway-Wide Traffic Data Collection System.