The Mill Road Sensor Project which monitored the eight week closure of the Mill Road bridge by Govia Thameslink to carry out crucial work to improve rail services in 2019 has now completed.
15 smart sensors were installed on Mill Road and surrounding streets to record numbers of pedestrians, bicycles, cars and other vehicles using the network in this area. During the works, access to motorised traffic was not permitted however pedestrians and cyclists were still able to cross the railway for most of the working time. The data collated and analysed by the Smart Cambridge programme has helped the Greater Cambridge Partnership understand how people use the road network and allowed engineers to see the impact of the closure on surrounding roads, including on air quality (Air quality work was completed by Cambridge City Council and information on this can be found on their website here). Final reports on the learnings from the project, which completed in December 2020, can be found on the Smart Cambridge website here. Data captured by the 15 sensors used during this trial can be found on this page for the period up to and including December 2020. Keeping the sensors in place for this long has also allowed teams to make greater comparisons, by taking in to account daily, weekly, monthly and annual variations in traffic levels.
The below data release offers counts for each sensor over 1 hour periods. The current data covers the period 03/06/2019 to 13/12/2020.
Hourly counts are broken down by inbound and outbound journeys. .
Counts are also broken down by vehicle type. This includes:
- Pedestrians
- Cyclists
- Buses
- LGV
- OGV 1
- OGV 2
The release also includes a full list of sensor sites with geographic point location data.
Data collected by the sensors from 1st January 2021 can be found here and will be updated on a quarterly basis. The Mill Road Project demonstrated the level of insight that can be gained from these sensors, leading to additional sensors in more locations being installed in Cambridge since the summer of 2019. Therefore the data on this page includes both the sensors originally installed for the Mill Road Project and additional sensors deployed at later dates.