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Last Updated on: 14th May 2025, 02:41 am
Transportation Secure Data Center Is Growing Its Data Offerings
This year, the Transportation Secure Data Center (TSDC) turns 15 years old, continuing to increase the availability and usability of travel and transit surveys and studies from municipalities, transit agencies, and other entities that want to share their results while protecting participant privacy.
The TSDC, developed and managed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), provides a secure platform for data owners to contribute their data and for interested researchers and others to study them from new angles, all while prioritizing security to keep survey participants’ private information safe.
“Often, organizations conducting these surveys are reluctant to share the data because of privacy concerns or simply due to limited staffing,” said NREL’s Joe Fish, a transportation research engineer who oversees TSDC operations. “The TSDC solves these challenges in a creative way and has a strong track record of success.”
Over the past 15 years, the TSDC has accrued more than 5,000 registered users from universities, automakers, governmental organizations, nonprofits, national laboratories, and other arenas. Building on its foundation of household travel data, the recent addition of transit data expands the variety of offerings found on the platform and informs critical crosscutting research on transportation energy, congestion mitigation, and more, while painting in ever growing detail the picture of how people get around.
On the Cutting Edge of Transportation Data
Even from the start, the TSDC was at the forefront of advanced transportation research. Back in the mid-2000s, the transportation data environment saw rapid change with the rise of GPS-based travel surveys. GPS sensors could generate high-fidelity, second-by-second data on people’s travel patterns. This was a boon to travel survey creators, who could use it to track people’s location information without having to rely on participants to recall and document their movements. NREL saw the potential for this detailed GPS data to inform a great variety of mobility research at the lab and beyond.
In 2010, NREL launched the TSDC with support from the U.S. departments of Transportation and Energy. In the past decade and a half, the TSDC has grown from hosting a few datasets to providing access to more than 19 million miles of in-vehicle and wearable GPS data and more than 26 million miles of data from household travel diaries. To date, data sourced from the TSDC have informed more than 260 research projects and related publications, demonstrating the value of the platform for researchers around the country.
For NREL, too, the TSDC has informed not only original research but also innovations in other tools and platforms. For example, other NREL-supported data offerings—such as Fleet DNA, FleetREDI, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Livewire Data Platform—were born out of the same approach to data security as the TSDC, providing multiple layers of access to various kinds of transportation data. Additionally, results from travel studies powered by NREL OpenPATH™—an open-source platform that generates unique datasets of partially automated travel diaries—are also housed in the TSDC. Plus, the GPS data found in the TSDC has informed NREL modeling tools focused on analyzing vehicle operations and mobility behaviors in different travel environments.
“Advanced NREL modeling tools such as FASTSim™, EVI-Pro, and RouteE were all developed and trained using the millions of data points available in the TSDC, allowing the lab to boast some of the most advanced, accurate, and adaptable tools in the field,” said NREL’s Jeff Gonder, a senior transportation research analyst and the founding project lead for the TSDC. “These tools are as robust as they are because of the TSDC.”
Not Just a Database
The TSDC platform provides two layers of access to meet different user needs. The public-facing portal lets anyone access cleansed travel survey data processed to remove any private location information pertaining to survey participants. It also includes detailed spatial data that users can access through the TSDC’s secure portal environment in which researchers can conduct analyses but not export raw data.
To access the secure portal, users must submit a request to NREL explaining why they want to access the spatial data and how they will use it. Once in the portal to conduct analyses, researchers can reach out to TSDC staff for support, similar to using a digital research library.
“Interfacing this way with external researchers allows us to better understand the types of data users are seeking and to keep our finger on the pulse of transportation research priorities and potential future partnerships,” said Brennan Borlaug, an NREL research analyst who leads advanced transportation modeling activities at the lab.
The partners who provide data to the TSDC also benefit, knowing that their data is being carefully stewarded and used for legitimate purposes.
“Atlanta Regional Commission fully takes advantage of the TSDC as a way to post data and especially to refer folks to the site for data requests and data downloads within a controlled environment,” said Guy Rousseau, transportation models and travel surveys manager for the Atlanta Regional Commission.
Hands-on engagement from NREL researchers extends from fielding data requests to processing and standardizing incoming datasets. Because every organization developing a travel or transit survey words their questions and organizes their surveys and data differently, NREL processes every incoming dataset to standardize data fields, streamlining how data are presented and allowing for easier data comparisons. The TSDC’s data standardization process greatly expands the number of comparable data points available for analysis, enhancing the collected survey data into something more than the sum of its parts.
“You don’t have to read hundreds of pages of survey documentation to understand what one data field means—we’ve done that for you,” Borlaug said. “The TSDC’s added value includes routines of data quality control checks and standardized data fields that make it faster for users to glean insights they are looking for.”
Growing Into the Future
The TSDC continues to expand, adding new datasets and making connections with more entities to store their data. True to the ethos of making data available for more users, in 2022, the TSDC incorporated the Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive (MTSA), a set of 70 historical travel surveys dating back to the 1960s from numerous public agencies across the United States. The archive was originally curated by a former University of Minnesota professor with funding from the U.S. Department of Transportation. MTSA was transferred to NREL to ensure its continued public availability.
“NREL’s TSDC provides a reliable, long-term support infrastructure for the Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive,” Fish said.
Starting in 2023, the TSDC also branched out to include a different kind of travel survey—transit surveys. It now contains data from more than 515,000 transit trips.
Transit surveys are usually structured differently and provide different kinds of information from household travel surveys, meriting their own new section in the TSDC. Transit agencies conduct surveys to collect data to plan operations and infrastructure and assess performance. The same transit survey data can illuminate ridership patterns, trip purpose, barriers to transit, rider preferences, and more, helping researchers connect the dots between multiple personal modes of transportation tracked in household surveys and the public transportation studied in transit surveys.
“Transit surveys can help answer a variety of research questions,” Fish said. “It is important to understand how well transit is serving different groups, so you can look at service performance by different demographic characteristics, household characteristics, and spatial distribution around the city.”
“Transit is also an important part of the transportation energy equation—increasing transit use and reducing single-occupancy vehicle travel could offer significant energy benefits,” Fish added. “So, understanding how the system currently is and isn’t working is valuable for informing future transit system improvements.”
Continuously on the leading edge, the TSDC provides a means for mobility data, collected for a single use, to live on and be accessed for other purposes in support of answering new research questions and informing transportation decision-making around the country.
Learn more about NREL’s transportation and mobility research, the Transportation Secure Data Center (TSDC), and other transportation data and tools. And sign up for NREL’s quarterly transportation and mobility research newsletter to stay current on the latest news.
By Aishwarya Krishnamoorthy. Article from NREL.
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