Understanding Vancouver's Traffic, an exploratory data analysis for Simon Fraser University SDA 490 Spring 2023.

This is an interactive tool designed to help you explore certain aspects of Vancouver BC traffic as well as byproducts of car ownership, alongside textual sentiment analysis based upon real opinions.

Our group aims to empower Lower Mainland residents with information to make better decisions about the city's infrastructure, with a focus on transportation education. Our goal is to influence policy makers in British Columbia to reduce traffic and optimize existing traffic by improving infrastructure. We will analyze data on current transportation patterns and infrastructure, as well as gather feedback from residents and stakeholders to better understand their needs and concerns.

• Our inspiration and research question
• Our hypotheses
• A collection of interactive heatmaps
• A collection of Various interactive plots
• Interactive textual sentiment analysis and emotion classifier
• Findings and explanations
• Suggestions and cohesive conclusion

This question is important to us as a group because as economics students we understand that most everything comes with costs associated with it.

Do you want to get downtown in the comfort of your own automobile? Well be prepared for the cost of traffic. Alternatively, if you want to get downtown quickly? Take the bus, but be prepared for abrupt stops, little personal space, and other costs of taking alternative forms of transportation.

This is just a simple example of our economic approach to thinking about how to both understand and alleviate traffic, while encouraging alternative forms of transportation

Some of our hypotheses include:

1. Increasing the number of traffic controls will have a reduction on private motor vehicle usage.
2. Reduction of motor vehicle usage changes with the severity of traffic control
3. The size of roads/sidewalks will have an effect on the amount of foot and bicycle traffic with respect to car traffic and vice versa.
4. The amount of traffic accidents is determined by the surrounding traffic infrastructure/lack of traffic controls.

As you will see as you explore this application, testing these hypotheses was of large importance for us.

This app was developed with the education of the user at the forefront of our minds. We think that the first step to solving traffic issues in Vancouver is through education in an interactive way to help users rethink their need for a vehicle.

Imperfect information causes inefficiency, and as economics students, where we see the ability for optimization, we will take it. Education is a barrier to entry for many, because “you don’t know what you don't know”. This fallacy in this case, leads to overpopulated streets, lower translink ridership, as well as increased crime, which will be highlighted in this exploratory data analysis.

We hope that you discover something new about the way Vancouver traffic and its byproducts affect the city.

Our team analyzed many types and styles of data from over a decade and transformed this information into what you will see and experience during the presentation of this R Shiny web app.

• Census Data.
• City of Vancouver intersection data.
• ICBC collision and traffic violation data.
• Traffic signal data.
• City of Vancouver crime data.
• Government of Canada job data.
• Scraped text data from the internet (twitter, reddit, etc).

Building a clear path is just one part of effective infrastructure/city planning and development. You should also establish a city plan to outline how you will achieve these goals. This illustration hopes to provide you with a better understanding and a realistic path to help change the reality of lower mainland traffic