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Comment by ddechamb | Hacker News Reader

In total, almost 5 billion vehicles covering a combined time span of 3.8 years were detected. The UTD19 traffic data is free for all research use. You only have to sign up, agree with the conditions, and you are all set.

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We are now in the age of multimodal mobility and this only covers the mode that is easiest to capture (vehicles using data from loop detectors). Having a dataset with the same spatial and temporal coverage but multimodal would be amazing.

Riding a bike I'm still interested in the volume of cars on the road, and probably more interested in the volume of cars than the volume of bikes to be honest.

It depends on the needs. In your case (it seems) you are looking for the safest (on shared infrastructure) and / or cleanest routes for biking. And the same value can be extracted for vehicle users (more efficient routes). In my case, it is mobility planning. I wasn't denying the value of the dataset, I was just asking for more :)

TBH, this is already quite a step. There's much more data available. I worked on systems that also had LPRs (license plate readers), and they generate more detailed information: you'd get 1M vehicle passings per day in a medium-sized city. But they're privacy sensitive. Same goes for bluetooth detection or face recognition. Data owners aren't going to expose that kind of fine-grained data to the general public easily.

Do you know if there are datasets with pseudonymized LPR data available? I'm not interested in the actual license plate obviously, but being able to so say that two data points are the same car would be extremely interesting data especially for these larger and larger datasets spanning longer periods of time.

I'm also aware there is still a bit of a privacy concern with that type of data but honestly don't really have the math background to know exactly how that occurs or the extent to which you can minimize it.

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