Wellington Traffic Visualisation aids local commuters

Sick of sitting in peak hour traffic? Thanks to ECS Honours student Josianne Hyson, slow mornings and frustrating commuting could soon become a thing of the past.

Josianne spent the year creating the “Wellington Traffic Visualisation”, a tool that helps the user to see where the concentration of traffic is in the central city and at what times. Users can also view more detailed graphs about a particular street by clicking on it or searching for it.

Josianne credits the initial idea to her supervisor, Associate Professor Kris Bubendorfer, who proposed the project. Her other supervisor, Senior Lecturer and ECS Head of School Stuart Marshall, helped with the user testing.

The Wellington City Council provided the data for the visualisation in the form of spreadsheets detailing traffic volume and speed information for each year since 1999. Josianne's tool was designed to help city planners find trends in the data with the aim of aiding the practical design of Wellington's streets.

“Reading the data from the spreadsheets it originally came in made it very hard to quickly spot meaningful changes or patterns”, says Josianne. “Having a visual tool that lets the user see the information in a graph or on a map makes it easier to find the trends in a high volume of data”.

In the user testing phase, Josianne showed the graphs she had prepared to her supervisors and classmates whose feedback was used to refine the visual information to make it more effective. It took her six months to build the system from start to finish, while juggling three regular courses.

“I had to draw on knowledge from a range of courses that I took at university”, says Josianne. “Courses that provided practical experience with web technologies, databases, visualisation and human/computer interaction were particularly useful for this project but many other courses contributed to my programming abilities as well”.

While there are currently no plans to sell the tool and Josianne is as yet unable to host the system publicly due to restrictions on the data, she hopes a future student will be able to carry it forward for their Honours project after she has made a few tweaks.

“This project was an opportunity for me to improve my coding abilities and learn new technologies. The large scale of the project was also an interesting experience dealing with an increasing codebase and researching solutions to the difficult challenges I encountered”, she says.

Josianne now has the opportunity to use these new skills in her chosen career. She has started working full-time at Powershop, where she has been interning for the last two years, as a Ruby on Rails developer. Ruby on Rails is a web application that combines the Ruby programming language with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Now Josianne also knows the best route to get to work in the mornings!