Motionworks

The Urban Planning Data Solution

Whether you work at a municipal agency, university, medical campus, financial institution, engineering and design consulting firm, or develop real estate, our continuous, traceable, near real-time data provide the most accurate view of household trip-making behaviors available.

Motionworks’® transportation data profiles person trips, not vehicle trips, based on our synthetic population that represents the movements of over 300+ million people. Customers have access to our Observed Travel Patterns, Person Itineraries, and Places data on a nationwide scale for transportation solutions. For individual projects, we offer a powerful forecast tool to predict future outcomes for transportation modeling.

Comprehensive Movement Understanding

Our observed data measure population in motion by mode (vehicles and pedestrians), speed, dwell time, and distance traveled for places, paths, and individual roadway segments – whether people are residents, employees, or visitors to the geography.

Identify Movement Motivation

Understand not just where people are moving, but why…are they on their way to a school, work, or on an errand? Motionworks® quantifies the primary motivation for each trip a person makes and the path they took to reach their destination.

Predict Future Travel Patterns

City infrastructure is constantly changing. Motionworks® solutions allow users to change current scenarios and predict the impact on transportation and movement in their key geographies.

CityCast.io was effective at letting us test different service scenarios… I appreciate having a platform that works across multiple cities and look forward to being able to generalize from multi-city studies in the future.
– Greg Erhardt, Associate Professor of
Civil Engineering University of
Kentucky

Questions we can help you answer

Do you need person and bicycle trips hourly, daily, and for every day of the year for your transportation planning purposes?

Don’t settle for a representative week and seasonal data when Motionworks® delivers a synthetic population with individual-level travel diaries (linked trips) detailing each person’s complete travel activities, dwell times, and travel speeds delivered in a timeline format. Our data is current with ample detail to match the population’s short-term and long-term movements for anywhere in the U.S. any time of day or day of the week.

Interested in tracking travel performance or infrastructure improvements in real-time and updating your travel demand models and forecasts systematically on demand?

Travel demand modeling relies on expensive household travel surveys which typically have low sample sizes, sampling biases due to nonresponse, and long gaps between surveys (years). Motionworks® curates comparatively low-cost population travel behaviors for anywhere, easily accessible through a web-based interface. Our data allows traffic modelers to aggregate robust travel and consumer data for any geography to update travel demand models in near real time for a fraction of the cost.

Would you like to know the transportation impacts from a proposed large-scale mixed-use development in your community ?

With Motionworks’® population travel diaries curated from over 300+ million movements, combined with our Futurecast software, users can instantly modify census tract-level housing and employee estimates, change growth projections, enhance mobility infrastructure, and/or remove roadway lanes to expand transit services. Our Futurecast software fuses the population travel behaviors with land use and transportation scenarios to derive data driven outcomes describing how the built environment will change. These tools are invaluable for urban and transportation planners. Our visualizations illustrate the route assignments and magnitude of movements throughout the transportation network as a result of a proposed land use intensification.

Want to improve safety in your community and effectively expand bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure?

Effectively investing in multimobility infrastructure requires a thorough understanding of the community’s roadway network. This includes incident data and established bike and pedestrian amenities, as well as travel volumes, times, speeds, and distances. Motionworks® data answers all these important questions. Distance traveled is a key criterion because if you can identify popular travel patterns consisting of a few miles or less, installing bicycle lanes and trails can effectively convert vehicle trips to active mode trips. In the U.S., the average bike commute is roughly 3-4 miles. Identifying those corridors with plenty of volumes traveling short distances provides the guidance needed to explore transportation alternatives

Planning to update an Airport Master Plan? Renovating and/or expanding capacity to enhance the customer experience?

More people are flocking to airports now that many travelers are vaccinated. After the passage of the Senate’s massive infrastructure bill, ten (10) U.S. airports began renovating and significantly expanding to accommodate increased travel. Motionworks data is invaluable in the airport master planning process because it identifies the travelers’ home locations and travel routes, travel times, speeds, and social demographics. We have this data for every airport in the U.S. for every day of the year as far back as 2019. Motionworks® data supports the existing conditions and demand analyses, circulation patterns, activity forecasts, and ideal off-premises parking locations to support an airport’s objectives.