The Center for Transportation and the Environment (CTE) supported the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority (NFTA) in a study of the feasibility of dynamic charging for on-demand airport shuttles by developing programmatic methods to visualize geospatial clustering, average speed, and other location-based trends using heatmaps.
CTE installed four data loggers on NFTA vehicles in Buffalo, NY, and collected data continuously for four weeks. A data analysis framework was set up, including GPS heat maps showing where vehicles spend most of their time, which could be filtered by a specific date range and/or vehicle(s), as well as locations where the vehicles were commonly stopped.
Summary statistics were calculated, including miles traveled per day per vehicle. Other summary statistics like range, averages, and standard deviations were also included. Based on miles traveled, CTE predicted the range of future electric vehicle daily energy consumption based on typical summer and winter conditions.
