What data is available? 

More than 10 years of traffic speed / travel time data are available for roads throughout Australasia.

Where does the speed / travel time data come from?

The data comes from TomTom’s huge “historical” database.  It is obtained through a dashboard provided by TomTom.  Access to the dashboard is only available under a licencing agreement signed and paid for by a licence holder.  TCi is a licence holder.

If you are interested in having your own licence then TCi will be happy to help you organise that with TomTom.

What is the source of the speed / travel time data?

The data is based on Floating Car Data (FCD).  Millions of TomTom navigation devices, in-dash systems and apps all send anonymised FCD data to TomTom servers in real-time.  The data are stored and then made available as historical traffic information.  More than 10 years of data are available for Australia, New Zealand and many other countries – which can be used to provide valuable insight into the traffic situation on the road network throughout any day during the period of record.

What does the data look like?

The data is highly granular. That is, it is very detailed both in terms of time and in terms of location.  Time is divided into intervals as small as 15 minutes.  Location is divided into links, from kilometres to as short as 5 metres, that describe changes that occur along a road.

Having  highly granular data makes it possible to do other granular analyses that were previously impractical or impossible.

How accurate is the information?

In each time interval (as small as 15 minutes), the ‘raw’ speed / travel time data are put into a normal distribution. The amount of data is determined by the number of probes.  The number of probes is declared in the output (per segment, for the user-specified date range and time-slices).  Of course, a higher number of probes means a more precise average and a smaller standard deviation.