minnesota traffic volume business scenario

aiding the minnesota traffic department in interstate highway planning with the help of data driven insights

This mock business scenario was performed as part of the Google Business Intelligence Professional Certificate course. 

The Minnesota Department of Transportation presented their business problem and requested a dashboard to be built to help their team monitor traffic patterns. Their goal was to learn about:

• Traffic volume throughout the year; ideally organized by year, month, week, day, and hour.

• Traffic volume in different weather conditions.

• Traffic volume on different holidays.

Knowing traffic patterns under these conditions would enable the team to make important infrastructure decisions. 

The image above represents the completed dashboard on Tableau that includes charts to view traffic volume by year, month, week or day, traffic volume in different weather conditions and traffic during various US holidays. 

It was observed that traffic volume peaked during the Summer and Winter months possibly because of vacations that fall in those months. Another factor that resulted in high traffic was cloudy weather although clear days were not far behind in terms of traffic. Among holidays, New Year's Day had the highest traffic volume when compared to other holidays. 

The data for this business case was provided during the certification course and included traffic volume data from 2nd October 2012 to 30th September 2018. The first chart is filtered based on relative dates anchored to the last date in the dataset (30th Sept 2018). In the Tableau dashboard, cross-filtering has been applied so that all charts filter results based on conditions specified in the first chart. 

Post dashboard creation, the stakeholder had some iteration requests as well which were addressed and a final presentation was created.