The City of Charlotte, North Carolina, chose RSG as part of a team to advise and assist with big data acquisition and analysis. The work sought to better understand the movement of people and freight within the region. RSG delivered project insights as a data consumer and a data provider. Specifically, we advised on big data issues related to trip-length biases, limitations on spatial resolution of cell tower triangulation, limitations of device ID persistence in GPS-based datasets, limitations of imputation methods, and the need for consistent trip definitions between multiple datasets.

The City of Charlotte also looked to RSG to help select a big data vendor, negotiate dataset specifications, and expand the data to ensure its representativeness for the region using an ensemble expansion methodology including parametric scaling. The expansion corrected for both coverage issues and trip duration biases which result in the under-representation of short trips in the raw data. RSG has worked with data from the American Transportation Research Institute, Cuebiq, AirSage, NPMRDS, INRIX, HERE, Strava, and StreetLight with applications in California, New York, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Iowa, South Dakota, Utah, Idaho, and Alaska.