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Here’s the tl;drHere’s how the municipality of The Hague was able to increase mobility and safety of their roads through a partnership with PublicSonar — a company that helps organizations make informed decisions using AI-driven insights. Through leveraging social insights, PublicSonar provides additional information to help The Hague traffic control center act quickly and effectively to evolving road conditions.

Challenge

Across continents and time zones, traffic is an unpredictable, chaotic facet of daily life. It’s an experience shared across the world, impacting the lives of many. Efforts to regain control of the roads are constantly underway, yet few places have taken matters more seriously than the municipality of The Hague. The Hague traffic control center invested in technology and intelligence tools like CCTVs and underground sensors, with the goal of providing quick, safe solutions and responses to the traffic-related incidents that inevitably arise in a large city. However, one challenge remained: how could they get the right information, in real time, in order to make the best decisions? Despite their advanced technological toolkit, The Hague traffic control center was still missing some key information. In order to help fill those gaps, they turned to PublicSonar — a company that helps organizations make informed decisions by using AI-driven insights.

Solution

The biggest hurdle to increasing mobility and providing safety is the ability to gain information from the ground. Fortunately, by partnering with PublicSonar, the municipality of The Hague was able to uncover the missing puzzle piece to traffic control: social media. Enter X. X’s real-time conversations were pivotal in providing insights for PublicSonar to fill in information gaps. For PublicSonar, the way in which X data is offered, and the stability and support from X’s API, is crucial for their work. Through the use of keywords, they were able to filter information for traffic-related topics, which they used to create an easily digestible online dashboard for the Municipality of the Hague to utilize. Their value is finding the balance that avoids too many false positives that will overload the traffic control center, while also ensuring no important information is missed.

Results

Through social media monitoring, PublicSonar provides The Hague with insights that allow them to make appropriate decisions during planned events (i.e concerts), typical situations (i.e. busy beach days), and incidents (i.e. car accidents). Ultimately, both technology and social insights work hand in hand to create a clearer picture, with social media providing more “eyes on the road.” These streams of information keep the fingers of the traffic control center on the pulse of what’s happening, so that they can continue to provide The Hague with safer and smoother driving conditions.