A new version of the system drills down to the neighborhood level, using data on commuter patterns.
However, large population studies controlling for multiple exposure measures in high-density settings with established commuter patterns are lacking.
The premise that fewer jobs means fewer commuters is based not only on the decline in traffic counts but also in the long-term analysis of commuter patterns.
It will explore new ways of measuring the economy, including using traffic sensors to gauge activity, mobile phone data to track commuter patterns and satellite images to estimate populations.
A motion approved at the board's monthly meeting urges the state's transportation agency to report to the board by late spring with an evaluation of the I-66 toll operations and its effect on commuter patterns to transit operations.
"They [transport authorities] have had average data until now which has been working well for them for a while but now the commuter patterns are changing quite a bit more," said Shivakumar. "In the US they have a 45mph speed limit on certain roads.
At the time, he compared commuter patterns in various Canadian cities, and saw how wildly different they were.
There is a lack of emphasis on radial lines connecting regional business centers which conform to the current commuting pattern, and there is no commuter railway plan for the region.
But the report singles out the stretch of the Interstate 5 between the Hollywood (170) and Glendale (2) freeway interchanges as an example of a corridor that regularly experiences heavy traffic congestion in both directions, as opposed to a more traditional commuter traffic pattern.
We have shown that simple heuristics applied to Twitter data offer good approximations of local commuting patterns; approximations that outperform the current benchmark for commuter flow estimation models (the radiation model).
