Transportation analytics 101: Understanding the future of mobility

In these hyper-connected times, in the hectic process of our workday, we freely and frequently use some keywords that mean different things to different people. We throw them around so often, that we get away from the defining the words. To help everyone understand these terms in the context of transforming transportation, we took some time to define key phrases and concepts that we use daily at Arity.

Culture

  • Transportation: The system or process of moving people and goods from one place to another
  • Personal mobility: How individuals move freely, without restriction
  • Last mile: The distance from a traveler’s specific location to a transportation source

Sharing economy

  • Gig economy: A dynamic labor market in which people are paid for specific tasks, aka ‘gigs,’ without a conventional employment contract
  • Rideshare: An on-demand service used by passengers to secure a ride via a private vehicle via a smartphone app
  • Carshare: A membership-based service available to qualified drivers to rent a shared vehicle for a pre-determined period

Automotive

  • Connected car: A vehicle using onboard sensors and Internet connectivity to optimize its own operation and maintenance as well as the convenience and comfort of passengers
  • Autonomous vehicle: A vehicle that does some or all the work of moving a vehicle using a combination of sensors, cameras, radar and artificial intelligence (AI)
  • Subscription model: When a customer pays a weekly, monthly or annual fee to access products, such as a vehicle, or services, like ridesharing

Insurance

  • Risk: When the probability of a variable (a vehicle getting into an accident) is known but the actual value of the occurrence (if the accident will occur at a specific intersection) is not
  • Driver score: A personalized score, based on driving behaviors that are impactful to driver safety and vehicle performance, such as hard braking, distance driven, time of day and speed
  • OBD or OBD-II: On-board diagnostics (OBD) is a term referring to a vehicle’s self-diagnostic and reporting capability
  • Telematics: The use of connected technology to transmit, receive, store, process and analyze data from devices such as mobile phones and/or OBD-II’s over a network to track and monitor a vehicle
  • Usage-based insurance: Usage-based insurance (UBI) is a type of auto insurance where premiums are based on customers’ actual driving behavior, as captured by telematics through a combination of on-board devices (OBD), connected cars, and/or a mobile device opted-in to driving data collection

Technology

  • Data: Facts and statistics that are gathered for reference or analysis
  • Data analytics: The process of organizing, querying and interrogating data to discover qualitative and quantitative insights from raw information sources
  • Data science: The discipline of making data useful

Arity’s role in the evolving ecosystem of transportation is unique. Our customers and partners are leaders in every segment of the ecosystem, including sharing economy providers, numerous OEM’s, several insurance providers, as well as our parent company (Allstate). This dynamic mix of collaborators has given Arity access to a high volume of high-quality data, allowing our team to identify and refine the insights and intelligence that power all the solutions that our customers and collaborators use every day. This straightforward collection and definition of the many terms we use every day is a small step towards facilitating to a shared understanding of the fundamental thing we are trying to achieve, improving the efficiency of how we get from one place to another.