Every time you pop the car into gear and pull away from home, work, or out on errands, your vehicle creates a trail of digital data: how far you drive in a year, how much gas you use, even whether you could have taken the MBTA or walked.
Multiply that bread crumb trail by 5.2 million times, for every registered vehicle in Massachusetts, and you have a giant electronic Rorschach blot showing how the state’s roadways, cities, and public transit systems are used and abused over a year.
Now state transportation officials and a local planning agency have come up with a typically modern way to interpret that messy inkblot of data to better understand how we get around Massachusetts every day, and what can be done to improve the daily drive: a data contest.
The 37 Billion Mile Data Challenge is a call to big data tinkerers and other computer specialists to dive into a massive database on the motoring public and produce charts, graphics, maps, interactive Web tools, and even games that provide insights on our driving patterns and habits and suggest solutions to reduce congestion.
Tim Reardon, assistant director of data services for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, a regional group involved in the data challenge, expects the results to influence how the state spends money on transportation programs.
“What does this tell us about where there are opportunities to make investments, or change policy, that will lead to less vehicle ownership and reliance on automobiles?” Reardon said.
For instance, the challenge hopes to discover what neighborhood characteristics make taking public transportation more likely or where investments in bike lanes or walking paths have made a noticeable difference in vehicle traffic, or why some neighborhoods may have less car ownership than others.
One eventual goal is to help Massachusetts triple the amount of travel by public transit, bike, or foot, said Rachel Bain, deputy registrar for operations at the Massachusetts Department of Transportation.
Presenting the data in a visual form alone isn’t going to achieve that, but it can get policymakers and transportation specialists thinking about innovative ways to address the state’s challenges.
“We don’t just want to look at data for the sake of looking a data,” said Bain. “We look for actionable data that changes behavior. That’s what we are the most interested in at MassDOT.”
The state transportation agency is hosting the event along with the planning council and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, a public agency that promotes the state’s tech sector.
The 37 billion miles in the title of the challenge refers to the amount of driving motorists in Massachusetts log each year.
Challenge participants will have access to the Vehicle Census of Massachusetts, a massive data set that the council spent two years assembling.
It includes more than 16 million records about 7.88 million vehicles registered in Massachusetts between 2008 and 2011, including the general location of where each car is registered and estimates on daily mileage based on annual vehicle inspections.
The planning council has added other information, such as fuel economy ratings and car sizes.
All of the data released by the council and MassDOT are anonymous, meaning there should be no way for anyone using the data to link a particular car, or record, to a specific address or its owner.
So far, 155 people have registered to take part in the challenge and download the information.
A kickoff event is planned for March 22 at District Hall, a gathering space in the South Boston Innovation District.
These sorts of data crunching events and hackathons have become more popular in recent years, and many other cities and government agencies are using them to inspire more creative analysis of public services.
In 2012, the planning council and Hubway, the bike sharing program, hosted a similar challenge that inspired the 37 Billion Mile contest.
If that contest is any indication, participants in the 37 Billion Mile challenge may be facing some impressive tech brain power.
Virot “Ta” Chiraphadhanakul won the Hubway contest while he was working on his PhD in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Operations Research Center. He’s now a data scientist at Facebook Inc.
His advice to anyone tackling the 37 Billion Mile contest is to begin by asking compelling questions about transportation and also to combine the state’s information with other publicly available data sets that relate to driving in Massachusetts.
“By putting all this data together we can find some new insights,” said Chiraphadhanakul.
“The hardest thing is to come up with interesting questions,” he added.
Participants don’t have that much time, however: Entries are due by April 19. The winners will be announced May 1.
More contests and data challenges are likely to follow as Massachusetts increasingly looks to engage the region’s innovation community in helping tackle other civic issues.
Consider all the data it collects on tolls, said Bain of MassDOT.
“I’m looking at it thinking, hmm, what will we do with this terabyte of tolling data.”
Michael B. Farrell can be reached at michael.farrell @globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeMBFarrell.