Use Urban SDK to respond more quickly to council and the public at large. Clearly articulate your work and the results.
In this webinar we cover how you can use Urban SDK to really provide some lift in your reporting efforts. Present your reports more clearly and concisely to council so they understand the fruits of your labor, and your current/upcoming projects.
Watch full training webinar
Transcript of training webinar
Intro
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us again today. We hope you all had a great Thanksgiving.
Today, as always, you've got Andrew and myself. My name is Ashley Thomas. I'm the Director of Customer Success over here at Urban SDK.
And I'll let Andrew introduce himself here in just a moment. But as always, if you haven't been able to attend any of our previous webinars, please let us know. We're happy to get you those recordings sent over.
We're very excited for our topic for today. We're going to be showing you how to share your reports and dashboards and maps with anyone in the public, so council members and constituents, things like that. So if you guys have any questions, please throw them either in the chat or the question section.
And without further ado, I will turn it over to Andrew to introduce himself and kick us off. Thank you so much, Ashley. So hello again, everybody.
I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. For those of us who have not met before, my name is Andrew Lerner. I'm a Senior Transportation Planner here at Urban SDK.
My background is in consulting transportation engineering, so I've been in many of your shoes before with a lot of projects. And obviously, one of the most critical aspects of any project that deals with public infrastructure is presenting appropriately stakeholders. Now, as Ashley sort of outlined at the beginning, that could be council members, that could be public works officials, that could be members of the public.
Ultimately, our job here relating to public infrastructure is something that touches essentially everyone who uses the road network or the trail network or the transit network. So the list of stakeholders is often long and we're here today to sort of dive a little bit further into how our platform can be used to communicate with those individuals. So prior to today, our trainings are really focused on ways that you can use Urban SDK to sort of save on field analysis and pinpoint areas of concern before you send staff into the field.
And that can involve quickly validating speed complaints, studying the impacts of traffic calming initiatives, and so on. Today's webinar is a little bit different. As I mentioned, it's going to be about reporting.
In essence, we want to discuss today how you can use Urban SDK to explain all the work that you do. Your work is obviously important. We serve the community.
We make roads safer. And you're shaping the present and the future of the place that you and your family and your community all live. But as we all know what this business is about is quite complicated, typically.
When explaining the minutiae of the day to day, it can be challenging. And when speaking with people who don't really understand or are not familiar with the world of traffic engineering, throwing out phrases like 85th percentile speed with no context or not being able to visualize what we're talking about can sometimes leave stakeholders confused. And when there's confusion, sometimes it reduces buy-in to the solutions that we're proposing.
So knowing this, Urban SDK has created several ways for you to make it easy to distill your accomplishments into more conversational or consumable talking conversation points. So today we're going to go over a few different aspects of the platform that can help you with communicating to stakeholders and to council members. We're going to talk about the tool tip on our maps, which allows you to focus in on what information you want to display when the user loads up an Urban SDK map and hovers over a link.
We're going to talk about how to export reports from different aspects of the platform to one another. And we're also going to talk and demonstrate a little bit how to publish a report and make it publicly accessible to anyone, regardless of whether they have an Urban SDK account or not. These actions will make it easier to quickly address any questions that come in about the state of your roadways.
Creating a Report
So with all that preamble out of the way, let's dive into the platform. So obviously I'm beginning at the login screen. I've put my credentials already, so we're going to click login.
And we're met with the splash screen, as always. So we'll go over to the sidebar, click the carrot to bring the sidebar out. If you've tuned into our previous webinars, you're probably going to recognize what I'm about to mention next, but if you haven't, it's important and worthwhile reiterating.
At the top here next to the star where it says personal workspace, we're going to want to click that drop down menu and jump into our organizational workspace, which for me is our internal Urban SDK workspace. The difference is personal workspace is a sandbox environment where you can play around with any of our tools or build sample reports that are not able to be shared with members of the public or other members of your organization. It's essentially a testing environment for you to understand how to use the Urban SDK platform.
But jumping into our organizational workspace allows us to share with other members of our organization and allows us to push those reports out to the public, as we're going to cover later today. So you can see we already have a few different reports on the go here, including one that we're going to come back to later. It says webinar in it.
And a separate one, which was my test from earlier, which we're going to not cover that one today, but we're going to click to build the report. We're going to build our speed report in the first place by going to the insights platform on the left side here. That's the insights beta.
So today we're met with our list of geographic areas, which is quite wide. These geographic areas that match a lot of our different customers around the nation. Because this is within our internal workspace.
We're going to select a certain area of Florida in the Orlando area. So we're going to go to our metro plan Orlando area here and immediately we can see we're focused on the state of Florida on the right here. We can choose either to pull an entire county's worth of speed data or we can choose to pull just a census tract.
So if I actually were to click county and continue, you can see that there's three different counties here. That are within this particular organization's purview. Seminole, I can't, I'm not personally a Floridian, so I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly, Osceola and Orange County, but we're actually going to go a little bit more in depth today and we're going to select specific census tracts because we know exactly the area we want to focus on.
And also that results in less load time since we're not loading an entire county's worth of data. So I'll click census tract and continue. And we're going to wait for a moment as the census tracts, as you can see on the right here, sort of populate and load in.
There's going to be a few moments today where we're going to wait for data to populate in the platform. This is, after all, a web based platform. So the speed at which it loads is contingent on a lot of different factors, including your own personal internet speed.
So we're going to wait for that to finish populating and then I'm going to select the census tracts in question. Should be almost finished soon. And speaking of internet speeds, I've noticed my personal internet speed is not great because where I'm based up here in Toronto, Canada, we're having a bit of a snowstorm today.
I can see it out my window. So I hope you're all a lot warmer than we are up here. Okay, so we've loaded our census tracts now.
So I'm going to pick the three census tracts we're going to look at, which is 171.10. As we click that, zoom in a little bit, we can actually see that it fills in, oops, it fills in the area that we're looking at. We're also going to pick 171.08 and 171.02. So we've got three census tracts worth of data that are going to be loaded into Insights now. So we're loading speed data here because we're going to be taking a look at a speeding problem on an arterial road very close to the Walt Disney World Resort.
Publishing a Report
And we're going to be showing you how to publish that data and share it with other stakeholders. So traffic speed analysis. We're going to be looking at data from July 2023 today.
So during the height of the summer, perhaps the height of the tourist season. And then we're going to click build report. You're going to notice also that it automatically loads these two previous supplemental months to enable a three month comparison of speeds.
So now I've clicked build report. Again, we're going to wait. This data loaded a lot faster, which is fantastic.
And we're immediately going to see, we're taking a look here, close the sidebar menu, at the insights tool. So what we're seeing here is speed data. The green, yellow, red is a measure of whether the average speed, since we're looking at the average speed layer here on the right, we can also switch to 85th percentile.
But this is a measure of whether the average speeds are below or near or above the posted speed limits with a magnitude of about 10 miles per hour in either direction. And I just mentioned posted speed limit. But what we're going to do is we're going to zoom in on a specific area and we're going to talk a little bit more about the posted speed limit in just one second.
So the area in question, I have written down here is 7910 Winter Garden Vine Road. As you can see, I searched in the top left search bar. So it comes up, I click it in and we're zoomed in directly to the area in question.
So I'm actually going to change the background here. You can kind of see we default to this very dark aesthetic, minimalist, black, sort of dark blue background. I'm going to change the background by going to the interactions tab and change it to the streets view, which will actually give me a little bit more in terms of labels of businesses that are within the neighborhood.
So that can tell us that immediately that we're looking at an arterial road, this sort of curving Winter Garden Vine Road here that is directly neighboring a plaza. You can see there's a McDonald's, a Publix, Chase Bank, a few different medical establishments, a number of other businesses. And of course, directly across the road is a series of townhouse complexes over here and then single family homes a little bit further to the east.
So what we have is an arterial road that separates a commercial use from residential uses. So this is a prime example where there could be conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles, because we have an arterial road that if you were to have the local context of this area, you'd understand is three lanes in each direction. It has a divided carriageway, meaning there's a large center median separating the two directions of travel.
And we have residents on one side of the street that may be crossing the street to the plaza on the other side for shopping or to visit a bank or a medical appointment to get something to eat at McDonald's, for instance. These are a lot of just common uses that someone who neighbors a plaza like this might have. So crossing this road is something we want to investigate the speeds on.
So I mentioned earlier posted speed limit. So if I highlight the links here, we're going to see speed category is what shows up immediately on the tool tip, which is this sort of pop up menu that we just saw. Speed category is something that we've developed here at Urban SDK.
It is a model essentially of estimated speed limits. It takes into account a lot of things like land use, road functional class, road width. And that's because we've developed this model because, as I'm sure many of you are aware, there's not really a good source of ground truth for posted speed limits across the nation.
So we have done this to estimate the posted speed limits. We find in general it is accurate to plus minus five miles per hour. So that number that you see that's 40 miles per hour, you can take as a plus or minus five.
So in this case, 35 to 45 miles per hour would be an estimated speed limit for this road. I've also gone and checked myself on Street View. And the speed limit in reality on this road is 45 miles per hour.
So again, we're in that plus minus five mile per hour sort of window. Now, taking a look at the speed data itself, I'm just going to hover over briefly. You'll see that the average speed.
So we have a knowledge that the speed category is 40 and the speed limit in reality is 45 miles per hour. We see that the average speed in the vicinity of the plaza on this particular link is 39.05. We go a little bit further north, it's 40.7. A bit further north and we're seeing 40.8. So the average speed is already close to the posted speed limit. And in fact, in some cases is exceeding the speed category.
And if we go a little bit further to the bottom, we see that the we see 29.65 is the average speed here. That's because this is a link that's directly adjacent to a signalized intersection. So obviously there's some vehicles that are stopping.
If we go further south, we see that the numbers, the average speed numbers are actually increasing. We see down here further south 48.16 is the average speed. So that's over the posted speed limit.
And if we go further south to where the software automatically colors red because it's more than 10 miles per hour above the speed category, we're seeing the average speed is now 52, which is more than 10 above the speed category, more than seven above the speed limit. So we can conclude that there is a problem speeding in this area, particularly when we look beyond average speeds to 85th percentile speeds, which is to say the speed where only 15% of vehicles on the road link will travel faster than this speed. And we see the 85th percentile speed is 47.7 above the posted speed limit.
So suffice it to say there's a speeding problem in this area. Now, if we want to take this information that we've just uncovered and go one step further, which is to be able to present this information in a more understandable way to members of council or stakeholders, what we're going to want to do is take this data from our insights tool and bring it into our studio tool where we can adjust how we want to display it and we can publish it in a way that can be visible to the public. So the first step to do that is to save this data to our data hub.
Saving to Data Hub
Now, a data hub in Urban SDK is essentially your system of record for data that you pull from our insights tool or data that is provided from other sources, say if you request other forms of data from us or alternatively data that you are able to upload yourself like census data or collisions data. So we're going to save this report here to insight, excuse me, to data hub. I'm going to go to this three dot menu up here and click export to data hub.
And I'm just going to move, whoops, that's myself there. I'm just going to move this window to the bottom and I'm going to give it a name like webinar length, speed, data, and I can choose whether to export average or 85th percentile or both. In this case, I'm only going to export the average speed and I can give it a tag to allow me to easily search.
Maybe I'll just say this is MetroPlan Orlando, July 2023. When I click export data, the data will be queued up to export to data hub. So I'm actually going to leave the insights tool and show you data hub to show where that data is found.
It's on the left here under this cloud icon. I'll leave with unsaved work and we can see the data that we just exported here. It's already complete up at the top.
Now, what I'm next going to do is go into our studio tool, which is our GIS mapping tool and show you how to display that data. The first thing we would need to do when we go to studio, which is the mapping tool on the left, is add the data to the studio map. So click add and what I would do here is click import from data hub, continue.
Then I would search for the data that we just saved, which is the webinar November 29th. When I click this dataset, it will begin to load the data into this platform and then it will populate it into the GIS mapping tool. Because, as I mentioned earlier, my personal internet speed seems to be impacted by the winter storms up here, I've pre-saved a map to avoid us waiting on this webinar for the data to save.
So what you would do here is you would click this, proceed through from data hub and click through the menus until it says import at the end. The data would import into your GIS mapping tool here. So I'm actually going to jump over to the map that I've pre-prepared, which is to go in our workspace where all of our saved mapping is.
This is what we saw when I began the webinar. That's this webinar November 29th, Orange County speeds. So this will also take a moment to load.
As I mentioned, this is a map that I just imported the average speeds data we were just looking at in Insights, which is the tool where you pull your speed data from. And I brought it into studio so we can map it and we can publish it and display exactly the kind of data that we want to be available to stakeholders. So as mentioned before, it's going to take a moment.
Maybe while we're waiting, I can actually just point out a few different aspects of the user interface here. Even better, loaded faster than I thought. So we have the studio map open and immediately we're displayed with all of the road speed data that we pulled out of Insights.
It doesn't have any particular symbology by default. It doesn't have any filters applied by default. All roads are drawn in the same way here.
So what we can do if we want is we can zoom in on the area we were just looking at here next to the supermarket and the plaza and I can actually change the map by going over to the base map tab here. You can change back to the streets map we were just using in our other tool and go back to the map layers. Now I can color data by speed if I so desire.
We have within our speed data specification the ability to look at different periods of the day, the seven typical time periods for transportation planning purposes like a.m. Peak, midday, p.m. Peak, overnight. We also have data for all seven days of the week. So in this example, we're going to take a look at data for midday on a Tuesday.
Tuesday and Thursday tend to be your most typical days in transportation planning for traffic conditions. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click the three dots next to the stroke color button and change the stroke colors based on the average speed on a Tuesday. And you can see we're on a color ramp here.
I'm going to change the color ramp to a green to red color ramp. So this is red to green, but I'm going to click the reverse button and now we have a color ramp where the redder the line is the faster the speed is basically. I can also change the stroke width to again be proportional to the speed.
So I'm going to do the same thing by clicking the buttons next to stroke width. Average speed of Tuesday. And again, we have thicker lines for faster speeds.
So now we've got a map that really kind of pops and really shows you what we want to see here. We're going to go a little bit of a step further and say if we wanted to present this speed map to members of council or to members of the public, we don't want to show all the ancillary data from all these other streets that are within the area. We're going to want to focus down on just the streets that we want to report, which in this case is Winter Garden-Vineland Road.
Filtering
So what we can do in the urban SDK platform is click the sieve here, this icon, which is our filter data. Add a filter, scroll down and you see we actually have road names in addition to county and state names for each road link within our data specification. So I can filter down just to the road that we're looking at.
So if I type in Winter Garden-Vineland Road, you'll see there are some road links missing here. The question might be why? The answer is that this is a road that has multiple names. It's also known as State Road 535.
And there's a couple of other designations, State Route and County Route 535. By adding multiple filters here, I'm actually able to stack those filters. So now we have data where this road is labeled in each of these different web pages, these different names basically.
So now we have the entire road. And once again, you can see we have the line thickness and the colors that are proportional to road speed. It's recalculated those colors and those thicknesses based on only the segments that we're looking at.
So I'm also going to filter down just to areas where the road speed is above 45. I click this Average Speed Tuesday and added 45 as the lower bound. So we can see that there's fewer of those segments near the plaza where there's more signalized intersections.
But speeds get much higher as we proceed further south away from intersections. And in this case also towards Disney World. The last thing we're going to do is add one more filter, change the period of the day.
These are the seven time periods of the day, one through seven representing overnight, early morning, a.m. peak, midday, etc. I'm going to actually just filter down to number four, which represents midday. And so now we're looking at data only from midday in the vicinity of, or in, excuse me, on a Tuesday when the average speed is above 45 miles per hour.
Customizing Your Tool Tip
The last thing I'm going to do before we save and publish this report is change the tooltip, which is when we hover over a line segment, we get all this data. This is all from the speed specification. This is the raw data.
And you can see all these different aspects of speeds, road name, county name, etc. You don't necessarily want to immediately present a council member or a stakeholder with all of this data. So we're going to filter down just to show in this tooltip what we want, which in this case is maybe just road name and average speed on a Tuesday.
So I click the interactions button on the top left. This is the tooltip for the layer in question. I'm going to click clear all.
Now when we hover over the data, we see none of that information is there. So I'm going to select the field, we're going to scroll down to road name, and I'm going to add average speed on a Tuesday. So now when I hover over a line string, we have road name, we have average speed on a Tuesday, exactly what we wanted.
So finally, now that we've done the filters, we've adjusted our tooltip the way we want it to be, and we've adjusted the symbology, we can save this report and we can publish it. So as you saw previously, I'd already saved this report, but you click the save button on the bottom left here, and it gives you the option to change the name and add a category for you to categorize and refer back to your reports. So I've added speed here.
Saving to Workspace
Clicking save will save it to your workspace, which is accessible on your left menu here. Where it says workspace right underneath the home icon. Now once you've saved a report, which we've already done in this case, you can also go one step further, which is publishing a report, which is kind of the crux of what we want to talk about here today.
Publishing a report generates a link. That's a public urban SDK link, meaning that anybody without an urban SDK account, whether they're logged into their account or not, if they have one, can access that link, they can look at the data, can play around with the data if they want, but they can't change the data. They can't, and they can't save the report to your workspace.
They can't delete your report. It's a simple, essentially a view only link for members of the public to be able to take a look at the report that you generated. So in this case, we want to share this report here with members of council or members of the public.
So I'm going to click the up arrow next to save, publish report, and since I've already published the report here, this switch here is on the right. It was originally on the left meaning unpublished, but by clicking it, I've made this report public, and I have generated two different very important pieces of data here, which is the public link. This is, if I copy this to my clipboard, this is what you'll then copy into, say, a public information session invite, or in an email to members of council, or essentially whoever you want to share this data in the view.
Only mode two. You also see a snippet here of code to allow you to embed this into a web page. We're not going to cover that at the moment here.
We don't have the time to go into web development at this moment on this webinar, but we're going to quickly also show you how if I open up a new window, we're not logged into my urban SDK account, we can check out this public link. So I'm going to open a new tab. I'm going to open an incognito tab, which allows me to not be logged into urban SDK anymore, and I'm going to paste that public link.
Now, again, it might take a moment, but this is what any member of the public would be able to see who's loaded up your publicly published link. Once again, we're just going to give it a second to load, or a few seconds, as the case may be. But essentially what the member of the public is going to be able to see here is what we were just seeing in our workspace previously.
They're going to see the same symbology and the same filters and tooltip that we just applied. Ah, here's what happened. Here's why it's not showing up the same filters and tooltip that we just applied, because I forgot to save the report first.
So if I save the report, I'm saving it with the filters and tooltip essentially applied. So now that I've saved it, I go back to publish, and I paste the link again. It may take a second to load, but we should again have the ability to see the same options and the same filters and tooltip that we just applied within our urban SDK platform.
Reviewing a Public Link
While we're waiting, I was just going to mention this is roughly the end of our webinar, just to review the public link. So while we're waiting, if we wanted to dive, actually, if we wanted to dive into any questions, if there are any, we can take them now, and then I can quickly just cover the once this data is loaded. Fantastic.
Yeah, we do have a couple, and if there's any more, feel free to throw those into the chat. But the first question is kind of circling back all the way to the beginning there. If we have a file with our accurate speed limits, are we able to override those in the platform? We absolutely can.
In fact, that's something that many of our customers have been working on with us, because we've developed this model for estimated speed limits across whatever geography it is, whether it's a county or an MPO boundary that you're working on. But if you have a file that has your up-to-date accurate speed limits, you can get in contact with your urban SDK account representative, provide us with the file, and we will have it loaded in so that rather than looking at speed category within your insights tool, you'll be looking at your actual speed limits. That also helps us as well in that it helps us build a more accurate model for speed limits, because as I mentioned previously, that ground truth for speed limits can be difficult to find on a nationwide scale.
Fantastic. And then the second question you already answered, it came in a little bit earlier. But just kind of circling back on it, the question was, are we able to embed these maps and graphics into a website or a piece of literature? And you showed us how to embed code with it.
Precisely, yes. You can use that embedding code to do so. I myself am not a web developer, but if you have any questions about how to do so or you need assistance in doing so, again, feel free to reach out to your urban SDK account rep and we can get one of our web developers to assist you in doing so.
Fantastic. Were those the only questions, Ashley? Those are the only questions we have right now. If you want to jump back into our public link.
Yep, this is essentially what I just wanted to show. These are the same filters and the same preferences for the map that we previously had taken a look at and we previously saved into our studio tool. So now anybody, whether they're a member of Urban SDK or not, they have a subscription or not, can take a look at the data here.
And we zoom in, we see the tool tip that we had previously selected. So at this point, if you provide this link to stakeholders, you provide this link to members of council. When presenting to members of council, you can easily reference just the data that you want to look at.
And then the data can also be downloaded on the left side here. Obviously, it's been working for my internet today. But all the different features that are available here are available to any member of the public who has this link.
But again, nothing can be saved into your workspace from here. This is a sort of a view-only mode rather than an editing mode, which is the crux of being able to present publicly. Fantastic.
Thank you so much, Andrew, and thanks for doing it all throughout a snowstorm. I know. No problem.
With your wi-fi today, but. Yeah, that's all right. We're hoping to stay warm soon.
Absolutely. And thank you everyone for joining us today. We will have our last webinar of the year next Wednesday.
And we will be showing you guys how to use our brand new feature, our crash integrations tool. So we hope to see everyone there. It's going to be a really exciting webinar.