Challenge

Due to the drastic impact on travel patterns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) sought to track transportation trends on a month-to-month basis. While Kittelson works with FDOT annually to track travel condition trends through the Source Book, we needed a new method of retrieving this data to make it practical to obtain it every month.

Solution

Kittelson created FDOT’s Current Conditions Mobility Reports each month to track travel trends over the course of the pandemic. These reports included a set of multimodal metrics covering automobile travel, freight movement, crashes, air travel, and more that could be computed quickly and often. Some of these metrics were adaptations of typical Source Book metrics – for example, using airport operations data instead of air passenger data to identify changes in airport travel from month to month. These Current Conditions Mobility Reports also allowed us to analyze non-transportation metrics to provide context on other aspects of life impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as small businesses open and unemployment rates. These metrics offered a telling narrative in conjunction with transportation metrics that may have suggested changes in travel patterns.