TomTom, navigation and mapping products maker, has launched a new Traffic Stats API. The API offers programmatic access to its Traffic Stats offering (i.e. a Web services suite that allows developers to create Web apps that analyze historical traffic data). Millions of TomTom navigation devices, in-dash systems, and apps send information back to TomTom to power the Traffic Stats API among other TomTom services. Such Floating Car Data (FCD) provides useful data to both TomTom and third parties who can build products or solutions based on such data.
"Traffic Stats give traffic experts relevant insight into the traffic behavior required for policy makers to make the right decisions for the future," TomTom Head of Traffic, Ralf-Peter Schäfer, commented in a press release. "TomTom's significant historical and real-time data will help deliver a smarter mobility for all and will help substantially reduce traffic jams in the future."
As Schäfer mentioned, TomTom has specifically targeted policy-makers with Traffic Stats. To get the policy-maker problem solving juices flowing, TomTom provided a list of common use cases. TomTom's suggestions include measuring stability in travel time for a given route, speed analysis on every road segment to determine traffic bottlenecks, measuring travel time before and after a road network change, detecting seasonal and event impact on travel, measuring route accessibility over time, identifying bottlenecks and congestion, displaying speeds on a map, measuring location attractiveness by car volume, using speeds and travel times for transportation models. These are a few examples, but we will see what developers come up with using the data TomTom constantly collects from over 450 million devices.
The RESTful Traffic Stats API is composed of the Custom Travel Times API and the Custom Area Analysis API. The Custom Travel Times API provides route-based and segment-based statistics (i.e. average route sample size, average travel time, average speed, 15th and 85th percentile speed, travel time ratio, 5th and 95th percentile travel time, and segment based statiscs). The Custom Area Analysis API provides statistics for each road segment (i.e. average travel time, average speed, median speed, standard deviation speed, sample size, 5th-95th percentile speed, speed limit, road name, and functional road class). The Custom Travel Times API returns data in XLS, SHAPE, KML, and JSON formast. The Custom Area Analysis API returns data in SHAPE and JSON formats.
Those interested can request access through a local partner, or a TomTom account manager. To learn more, check out the API docs. Developers can see all TomTom APIs at the TomTom Developer Portal. There, developers will find a host of services including real-time map services, customizable hardware, navigation software, sports apps and devices, online navigation systems, and a host of APIs (e.g. Routing API, Maps API, Search API, Traffic Incidents API, Traffic Flow API, and more).