Cambridgeshire County Council has been awarded a £94,000 grant to open up some of the county’s transport data to support innovation and improve traffic networks.

Announced on Thursday 30 May 2019 by the Department for Transport, the award follows a successful bid to the Opening Local Authority Transport Data Competition 2019 by the Smart Cambridge programme, which is part of the Greater Cambridge Partnership.

Future of Mobility Minister, Michael Ellis, said: “We are on the brink of a revolution for the future of transport, with ground-breaking technologies and new data opportunities creating huge opportunities for cleaner, cheaper, safer and more reliable journeys.

“We now need to ensure the infrastructure surrounding these technologies is in place and can accommodate these innovations. The new parking data standards will bring government, private organisations and technologies together to ensure a smoother parking experience for drivers.”

The Open Transport Data for Cambridgeshire project will be led by Smart Cambridge working with the County Council’s Transport teams and the University of Cambridge over the next year.

The grant will be used to open up urban traffic management data, Bluetooth Data and real-time car parking data sources and feed the raw data into a common database.

The Intelligent City Platform developed by Smart Cambridge in conjunction with the University of Cambridge, will process the data and make it openly available.

The data can then be used to identify areas where highways operations can be improved, provide live incident management, support transport planning and the development of innovative products or solutions

The data will also feed into the Geospock platform, which the County Council has a license for, allowing it to be visualised and analysed providing insights to help inform future decision making.

The available transport data not only covers Cambridge, but also Peterborough and several of the county’s biggest towns, so work and ideas developed within the city can be shared and rolled out across the county.

Welcoming the announcement, Councillor Steve Count, Leader of Cambridgeshire County Council, said: “I am delighted that the Department for Transport has awarded funding for this project to make the county’s existing transport data open, which will help us to ensure its potential is maximised.

“Making more effective use of our data will help our decision-making as we rise to the challenges as well as the opportunities of high growth across the county. This will allow us to continue our work to open our existing transport data sets and just as importantly, present it in a way that is useful and useable, for the benefit of the wider community.”

The transport data will also be used to support the work of the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority as well as that of the Greater Cambridge Partnership, to improve the transport infrastructure, invest in future transport technologies and promote sustainable travel options.