Bentley adds traffic modeling to Digital Cities offering

Bentley Systems today announced two acquisitions that will extend its Digital Cities offering to traffic modeling, analytics and planning — what digital cities types call mobility. By adding Citilabs and Geospatial Technologies to the company’s current offerings, CEO Greg Bentley says, users will be able to bring together accurate models of existing roadways with planning and simulation for new capacity, and with roadway engineering. If you’ve ever sat in traffic on a brand new yet inadequate road (Boston’s Big Dig, I’m looking at you), you’ll understand why this is so necessary.

Citilabs makes Streetlytics, a product that grabs data from GPS, cellular, connected car, Bluetooth, traffic violation tickets and other data to create time-stamped images of vehicle movement. This helps planners, engineers, and infrastructure asset managers model transportation trends. Bentley CEO Greg Bentley showed a video of Streetlytics: over a timestamp, we could watch the East Coast of the US wake up and commute to work, then the middle of the country and finally, the West Coast. Then trucks and other vehicles took to the road. Finally, at the end of the work day, the whole thing reversed as people headed home from work. At a more local scale, this matters because we need more and better roadways to deal with congestion, perhaps via new traffic patterns, road designs or maybe taxation via fees levied on people who drive into cities at certain times of day.

Citilab also makes CUBE. a forecasting solution for modeling traffic and land use as well as truck movement as well as public transit usage, all in response to roadway changes.

Geospatial Technologies (Orbit GT), on the other hand, makes 3D and mobile mapping software that helps users manage, process, and share very large amounts of image, point cloud and 3D mapping data.

What does all this do for traffic planners and engineers? Orbit GT will add drone-and vehicle-mounted mobile mapping to Bentley’s existing Context Capture solutions while CUBE simulations will enable users to model the capacity of existing and proposed roadway assets. Streetlytics traffic data will become available through Bentley’s cloud services to calibrate and validate mobility digital twins.

Financial terms were not disclosed — but I don’t think either of these companies has enough revenue to move the needle on Bentley’s roughly $700 million annual revenue run-rate.

The title image is from Bentley, which asked for the following caption: “Citilab’s CUBE simulation software provides predictive transportation technology, helping engineers and planners to design and optimize safe, efficient, effective, and environmentally sustainable mobility systems.” I believe it shows the impact of a change in the road network on the traffic in the region.