Inside TomTom’s Traffic products: Traffic Stats

Since 2008, TomTom has been collecting anonymous, GPS-based measurements from its global community of drivers and connected devices. Using these trillions of measurements, the company has built a unique database of historical traffic — the largest of its kind in the industry. With TomTom Traffic Stats, customers gain direct access to this wealth of traffic data which they can use to identify mobility pain points, assess the impact of road network changes, improve traffic management and much more.

Every day, more than 600 million TomTom navigation devices, in-dash systems and apps send anonymized data to the company’s servers in real time. Known as Floating Car Data (FCD), it captures geolocation and speed information directly from moving vehicles.

TomTom uses FCD as the basis of many of its traffic products, including TomTom Traffic Stats. The solution acts as a gateway to the decades of data captured by TomTom on road speeds, travel times and traffic density. Traffic Stats makes it easy to obtain a comprehensive picture of real-road conditions — insights that have traditionally been difficult and costly to come by.

“Without Traffic Stats, the only way to obtain this road network data is with expensive built-in hardware, like traffic cameras,” explains Kristina Vuletic, Senior Product Manager for TomTom Traffic. “Road authorities and municipalities tend to be the only organizations who deploy this kind of hardware, and who have direct access to the data it captures. What’s more, these systems usually only cover a fraction of the road network, offering a limited picture of traffic movements.”

In contrast, with Traffic Stats, there’s no need to set up or maintain hardware systems. TomTom captures all of the data itself and serves it up for analysis and reporting on demand (more details on how this happens later).

The insights delivered by Traffic Stats are extremely helpful for anyone in the business of managing transport and mobility, from traffic engineers and consultants to municipalities and transport agencies.

A classic use case is analyzing traffic conditions for a specific area or route. With Traffic Stats, it’s possible to measure how travel times and speeds change over time on a given route, identify congestion bottlenecks in a particular area and measure the impact of changes to the road network.

Brussels Mobility is one TomTom customer putting those capabilities into practice. After making changes to the city’s road network, such as converting car lanes to cycle paths, it ran before-and-after comparisons in Traffic Stats to see how the changes impacted mobility. Armed with these data insights, the organization is making smarter decisions that help people move through the city more safely and smoothly.

It’s not just traditional traffic management that stands to gain an advantage from Traffic Stats. Once you dig a little deeper, it becomes clear that all kinds of organizations and industries can benefit from the solution’s historical traffic insights.

Kristina Vuletic gives an example: “Insurance companies can use Traffic Stats to measure traffic flow and density on different roads. As a rule, the more traffic on a road, the more likely it is for accidents to occur. With this information, insurers can better determine how risky it is to drive in certain areas and adjust their policies and pricing accordingly.”

For retailers planning their next store opening, Traffic Stats makes it easier to pick the perfect spot. Imagine a coffee chain looking to open a new location downtown that has multiple options to choose from. They can use Traffic Stats to map the historical volume of traffic passing by each location and determine which spot is likely to receive the most traffic, which translates into potentially higher business volumes. Another company could run a similar analysis to pick the best spot for an advertising billboard, ensuring it gets more eyes on a new product campaign.

Reflecting the diversity of use cases served by Traffic Stats, TomTom’s solution supports multiple data formats and delivery methods. It returns data in Excel, JSON, KML and Shape formats, supporting compatibility with many different applications.

Traffic Stats is available as a RESTful API, ready for integration with organizations’ existing analytics platforms and business systems. The solution is also accessible via the TomTom MOVE portal, where customers can access ready-to-use data visualizations and analytics reports from Traffic Stats, plus step-by-step guides on different product features, reporting functionality and more.

However customers choose to access Traffic Stats, the solution makes it easy to analyze vast volumes of traffic information and explore the results. With the simplest set of inputs, users can create a customized query for a specific route or area. This analyzes vehicle probe counts (used to indicate the relative traffic volume on individual roads, with more probes meaning higher traffic), along with average speeds and travel times over a specific time period, ranging from hours to months. Once the results are computed (usually in just a few minutes) Traffic Stats returns a report that’s available to view or download.

From there, users can refine their analyses by setting different filters or parameters. For example, after looking at average travel times on a particular route, a logistics company might want to drill down further to see how traffic changes over every day of the week. In this way, they can determine exactly when that route is at its busiest, so they can help their drivers avoid traffic and reach delivery destinations in less time and with less stress.

Whatever the case may be, Traffic Stats provides plenty of options, so organizations seeking a better view on traffic can gain the insights they need to make smarter choices.