Vehicle travel trends in Canada tool

There are four metrics presented in Trip Trends: distance travelled, or vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT), trip count, trip duration, and average travel distance. To normalize these metrics, INRIX Trip Trends first establish a range of dates that would be considered typical with respect travel demand and traveler behavior. These “typical” dates are defined as all non-holiday dates in 2020 between January 20th and February 28th, inclusive. Documented school holidays are excluded as much as possible. From these dates, we compute the median trip count, distance travelled, trip duration, and mean trip distance by day of week and (for cities, counties, and zip codes only) time of day bins. The values you are seeing in the plots represent the observed measure divided by the median typical value for that measure for that day of week and/or time of day bin. In practical terms, this represents the observed measure as a fraction of what would be expected in the absence of a global pandemic. 

All metrics have been seasonally adjusted. In the Trip Trends context, seasonal adjustment describes a process by which the data from the baseline time period is adjusted to reflect the expected values for a given time of year, assuming an annual trend of zero.  

Trip count: INRIX Trips are created using data from a variety of sources, including in-vehicle navigation, mobile applications and software development kits (SDKs), and commercial vehicle transponders. As one can imagine, there is a certain amount of heterogeneity present in terms of GPS ping frequency and the extent to which individual trips are discernable from collections of GPS points. The INRIX Trips engine parses all incoming GPS data, delineates GPS points into self-contained trips with clearly defined start and end points, and applies a series of methods to add additional information such as endpoint quality ratings and travel mode.   

Vehicles kilometers travelled (VKT) or travel distance: we use the sum GPS point pair distance as a proxy for VKT.  Under ordinary circumstances this might tend to skew the VKT relationship between different locations toward those with lower road density/complexity, this is not an issue for Trip Trends because each location is normalized to its own baseline.  

Trip duration: Using the output of the INRIX Trips Engine, total trip duration is computed as the sum difference in time between the start and end points of all trips for a given vehicle type and time period originating in a region.  

Average travel distance: Average travel distance is estimated as the following ratio of Travel distance / Trip count, where these metrics are computed for each region, and time period.