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What is route analysis?

Route analysis is a way to inspect and compare values along a specific path in a road network (a “route”), rather than aggregating across an entire area.

A route is built from connected line segments (typically road segments). Once you have a route, you can analyze it by different attributes, for example:

  • Number of trips along the route

  • Average speed along the route

  • Travel time or other numeric attributes you have available

Route analysis is especially useful for corridor-style questions like:

  • “Where along this corridor do we see lower speeds?”

  • “When does congestion occur, and on which part of the route?”

  • “How does traffic volume vary from segment to segment?”

Route analysis in 2D (TX diagram)

From data to insights

The different steps required to go from your data to route insights are:

  • Create a Geometry or Time Series data set using line shapes with connectivity information.

  • Create routes on the resulting (road) network on the visual analytics page.

  • Use the route analysis capability of the visual analytics page

The sections below (and the next articles) walk through each step in detail.

  1. Prepare the network dataset

    Your road-network lines must include connectivity information (start node id and end node id) so that segments can be chained into a graph on which routes can be computed.

  2. Create routes

    Use the route creation tool to click connected segments in the map and save the resulting route. Saved routes are reusable.

  3. Analyze

    Open the Route Analysis dialog, select a route, choose 1D or 2D analysis, pick an attribute to style by, and inspect/export results.

A single saved route can be reused across projects and analyzed with different attributes (e.g. trips vs speed) without recreating the geometry.