Case study: How can technology help policy decision making?

Decision making in transport sector is challenging especially having in mind that decision makers in this sector decide about expensive project with great and deep social impact. To ensure easier and cheaper decision-making process in transport sector transport models are prepared and used.

Transport models in general changed the transportation engineering offering a powerful platform to simulate and forecast transport flows using the power of today’s technology. The purpose of these models is to simulate people movement on high-level basis. They are making possible to simulate different transport policies, construction of new infrastructure as well as upgrade of existing infrastructure and introduction of new services (e.g., new public transport line). Potential of transport models use is almost limitless and depends on input data quality.

National transport models are used in countries all over the world to inform policy making. Besides being a tool that provides the current situation overview of the passenger and goods movement on a national level in all transport modes, and being used for making strategic infrastructure investments, it also enables insight in infrastructure management regarding efficiency, environmental and safety. Models can be used for various scenario simulations and they can produce or help produce KPI’s used to make feasibility studies or cost-benefit analysis of different transport projects.

As the most important decision-making institution in Croatian transport sector, Ministry of the Sea, Transport and Infrastructure of Republic of Croatia created Croatian transport model called National Transport Model. Model was made in 2017 as beginning of the transport models use in decision making. During preparation of different transport investments, the Ministry realized that National Transport Model needs comprehensive update and upgrade in order to have accurate and upgraded basis for preparation of such investments as well as for policy decisions.

To ensure high quality transport model, it had to be updated and upgraded according to the changes in transport sector. This means that new data had to be collected, processed, imported in model and calibrated.

The update and upgrade made by EY required comprehensive collection of data for complete passenger and freight transport network on a national level from private and public operators and institutions, household surveys, input of data in special software for transport modelling and calibration of the model itself.

All that in challenging 9 months period, as accurate National Transport Model was a precondition for preparation and consequently presentation of huge transport investments for next programming period to European Commission. The task was given to EY Consulting Zagreb office who is providing long-term technical assistance to the Ministry of the Sea, Transport and Infrastructure. The project started in December 2019 and was finished in August 2020.

EY was faced with the challenge of collecting the data from numerous organizations during COVID-19 lockdown period and following that with unexpected challenge of digitizing data received in various formats - vast majority in printed/hard copy, as there is currently no established systematic approach for data collection - in order to be able to import all data in transport modelling software.

In addition, there were cases when needed records did not exist, so alternative directions had to be used to access the relevant data. The entire transport system of the Republic of Croatia needed to be digitized, which did not exist until the update of the National Transport Model. In addition to digitalization, it was necessary to find a way to import the results of the household surveys and at the same time comply with GDPR.

Activities such as georeferencing public transport stops and importing public transport lines, and their departures in the model, have been accelerated by innovative solutions developed by EY experts especially for this project:

• The development of EY's own software tool for geocoding tens of thousands addresses from household survey,
  
  
• The development of EY's own software tool for digitizing and processing scanned data – more than four thousand pages were scanned and digitized to make digital bus lines in the transport model,
  
  
• Timetables digitalization in the Republic of Croatia was also done by creating EY's own software tool for creating GTFS files (standardized file format that helps to digitize public transport lines) – more than 33 thousand departures on more than four thousand public transport lines are digitized automatically.

This highlighted the importance of the existence of digitized data that makes it easier to create and supplement any tools. To comply with the GDPR, the data of the market research agency that conducted the household surveys were pre-coded to obtain the necessary population travel data.

As part of the Update of the National Transport Model EY did: 

• Household surveys on a sample of 5 thousand inhabitants of the Republic of Croatia,
  
  
• For the first time ever, more than 7 thousand public transport stops (all stops in Croatia) were georeferenced and imported in the model,
  
  
• As well as stops, for the first time ever EY provided digitization of more than 4 thousand public transport lines including more than 33 thousand departures,
  
  
• Prepared categorization and import of transport network characteristics,
  
  
• Detection, analysis and introduction of more than 500 new road sections in the model with the total length of more than one thousand kilometers,
  
  
• In cooperation with Ministry of the Sea, Transport and Infrastructure, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Croatian pension insurance institute – collected travel data for 1.5 million inhabitants of the Republic of Croatia
  
  
• Calibration of the model in order to deliver realistic scenarios for future transport investments.