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Driving Budapest forward: How BKK uses Databricks to transform city mobility
Max von Münster, Estilla Híves, Istvan Viz, Engin Erzengin
- Source
- Databricks
- Published
- Added to Yomu
Summary
BKK, Budapest’s unified transport authority, manages public transit, shared mobility, infrastructure, and traffic systems for a city of 1.7 million people. Its legacy on-premises warehouse and fragmented Excel- and PowerBI-based reporting struggled with growing, varied data, limiting efficient access and analysis. BKK phased a migration to Azure Databricks, starting with mobility datasets and carefully modeling and validating data from vehicle GPS, passenger sensors, boarding schedules, and other systems. The Databricks Lakehouse lets analysts process large geospatial datasets in shared SQL, Python, or R notebooks, supporting minute-level shared-mobility tracking, route-performance analysis, airport-bus forecasting, and dynamic scheduling. These capabilities provide faster insights and more responsive decisions, while governed access and cost visibility support broader collaboration and BKK’s vision for a digital twin of Budapest’s mobility system.
Context
BKK’s on-premises Microsoft SQL servers and fragmented Excel- and PowerBI-based reporting struggled with the growing volume and variety of mobility data. Analysts had to extract subsets into Jupyter notebooks, while decentralized information made it difficult to centralize datasets, share them across teams, and support advanced geospatial analytics and machine learning.
Approach / What changed
BKK began a phased migration to Azure Databricks, starting with mobility data and emphasizing careful cloud modeling and validation. The resulting Azure-based Databricks Lakehouse centralizes data from vehicle GPS, passenger sensors, boarding schedules, and other systems, enabling collaborative SQL, Python, and R analysis. Abylon helped develop the cloud data platform, migrate the data warehouse and data operations, and guide BKK into the Databricks ecosystem.
Takeaways
- BKK maps more than 900 shared scooters and bike-sharing stations every minute to monitor parking needs and guide allocation decisions.
- Combining live airport API data with long-term demand forecasts lets BKK update airport-bus schedules in real time and plan passenger demand through 2033.
- Governed mobility-data access, team-level cost tracking, and compute-cost visibility support wider collaboration, budgeting, and resource planning.