Floating car data (FCD) is commonly used to derive historic travel times on individual roads, as well as evaluate traffic data algorithms. FCD, which is GPS data obtained from navigation devices and applications, provides a vehicle’s location and speed to feed live automated traffic management systems with essential information. TomTom’s Nick Cohn writes about it on his blog.
With a market share of 80% of real-time traffic services for automotive navigation in Europe alone, TomTom is the global leader in traffic and live services. With over 600 million drivers in 81 countries using their connected navigation, they are increasing road safety and making the roads less congested for all.
Public authorities are continually evaluating alternatives for improving road infrastructure. In cases where management alone cannot optimize the existing capacity of roads, authorities often make investments to expand the capacity. Historical data can support the decision-making process and evaluate the return on investment by providing travel times and speeds on the road and the surrounding network both before and after the new infrastructure was built, origin-destination travel flows to help predict what trips will be influenced by the change in infrastructure and input to travel forecasting and simulation models to help arrive at a final, optimal design.
By being able to predict traffic, offer accurate arrival time information and find the best route for each journey, TomTom Traffic, and Live Services cater to drivers, automakers, governments and technology companies across the world. For public authorities, in particular, knowing how to influence traffic in order to ensure viable traffic flows and the efficient use of the infrastructure is critical. Traffic is connected to transport, commerce and a healthy economy, and using location technology is game-changer for how drivers move around their cities.
Source: Nick Cohn