VAST Challenge 2017
Mini-Challenge 1
No
120 hours
Yes
General traffic is highest from 6AM to 6PM and lowest from midnight to 5AM. Due to the placement of the restricted ranger gates a lot of traffic funnels through general gates 1 and 2 at the north end of the park. In particular, the path between Entrance 1 and 4 is very indirect.
Bus traffic is entirely through-traffic and highlights the indirect natures of some paths through the preserve.
4-axle truck traffic is also through-traffic and remains generally constant throughout the day, with some anomalies on Tuesday and Thursday discussed later.
Park vehicles are mostly active from 6AM to 8PM with minor activity trailing off until 2AM. All park vehicle traffic starts and ends at the Ranger Base. Campsites are only visited by park vehicles between about 6:45AM and 10:00PM. Before or after that the park vehicles are traveling to Ranger Stops or heading back to base.
Ranger Stop 6 is the busiest but is more often just passed through. Likewise, Ranger Stops 0 and 2 carry a good amount of through traffic. Taking that into account it seems that Ranger Stop 3 and to a lesser extent 5 are the more common target destinations. Park vehicles do not stay longer than an hour at any stop and no stop has significantly longer stay durations that others.
Traffic visiting campsite accounts for a little over half of all traffic through the park and the overwhelming majority of time spent in the park is by vehicles staying at campsites. Most campsites were utilized equally with Camping 2, 4, 8, and especially 5 being slightly more popular.
Camping 1 however is far less visited and even ignoring durations short enough to simply be a vehicle passing through it has the shortest stay durations. When looking at longer term (more than 1 day) camping visits it appears to have a higher average, but that is an artifact of too few observations and an outlier. It would seem something is undesirable about Camping 1.
There is a bias for vehicles to exit by Entrance 3 if they camp in the preserve. This is bias is not meaningfully impacted by the gate that the camper used to enter the park.
Excepting park owned vehicle traffic, the preserve exhibits strong seasonal patterns over the year of the provided data.
Campsite usage has its peak during July with upward of 100 new camping vehicles arriving on weekend days but campers are almost completely absent from October through April.
Bus traffic has no defined peak but is most active from June through September at 4 to 8 buses per day and slows to only a few buses per day from November through January.
Heavy Truck traffic has a similar July peak to the camping traffic, reaching at most 10 trucks per day but more typically between 3 and 7. Heavy trucks only have a significant reduction in traffic from November through January, the same as bus traffic.
As one would expect, activity around the camping areas is increased by around 40% on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday compared to the rest of the week. This pattern is not present in traffic that doesn't visit the camping areas and perhaps marginally exhibits the opposing pattern.
A single vehicle with id 20155705025759_63 has been in the park without exiting for 350 days. As of the end of the data collection period the vehicle is still in the park.
The vehicle has a strong pattern of staying in a campsite for a month before traveling with minimal delay to the next campsite. The order of the camping journey: Camping 6, 2, 3, 5, 0, 2, 6, 3, 4, 0, 4, 2, and 5.
Campsite 1 is omitted since they didn't camp there, they merely drove through. Camping 8 and 7 were also oddly not utilized, at least not yet.
There are several vehicles that have reuse of their id tags across multiple entrances to the park. Six of these occurrences are 4-axle trucks that stop by a gate one day prior to passing through the preserve.
Car 20162027042012_940 camped for two days at campsite 1 starting May 27th, 2016 and after departing on Sunday came back twice to the campsite for a few minutes.
Car 20162904122951_717 camped every weekend from March 4th, 2016 to April 10th, 2016 at campsite 0. They always arrived around noon on Friday and leave in late evening on Sunday.
Car 20154112014114_381 and 3-axle truck 20153712013720_181 have recurring visits to Camping 6 with three instances of about 9 hours of overlap where they are both in the campsite. 20153712013720_181 stops visiting the campsite after 20154112014114_381 stops visiting.
A 2-axle truck 20154519024544_322 spends every weekend at Camping 4 from June 19th, 2015 to October 5th, 2015. They first arrive at Entrance 1 and exit and Entrance 4 but on all subsequent trips use Entrance 4 to come and go.
Six 2-axle vehicles traveled to Ranger Stop 1 on July 10th, 2015. Their vehicle ids are 20152810102803_808, 20152810102819_458, 20152810102828_459, 20152910102928_970, 20152910102959_782, and 20153010103017_871. This is the only time external vehicles access this ranger stop.
They arrived as a group between 10:35AM to 10:38AM but left separately spanning from noon to 4:21PM. They all arrive from Entrance 1 and head straight to the ranger stop before leaving.
A park vehicle does visit the stop just before 11:45AM while all the vehicles are still there. But the park vehicle doesn't stay for long and continues normal behavior afterward.
There are 23 instances of a 4-axle truck traveling from Entrance 3, the industry entrance, to Ranger Stop 3 by way of Gates 5 and 6, which normally only are used by park vehicles, before returning to Entrance 3.
This route is taken by a single truck at a time and occurs between 2AM and 5AM which happens to be the time when the park vehicles are the least active. The trucks also only make the route on Tuesdays and Thursdays with Tuesday being twice as common for the trip as Thursday.
