Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/41362
lTomTom Custom Travel Times provides road-network statistics that help ensure the road network is used efficiently as well as plan future developments. cost-efficient and flexible option for expanding cover- age and improving the quality of traffic information. As such, it's most likely to be used as an additional, complementary data source. Future developments involve using FCD for more than speed measurements. Traffic-volume estimation will become possible as well as viewing overall traffic movements from one area to another, by route. These types of uses, however, always will be limited by privacy restrictions. Extended Floating Car Data (XFCD) is ushering in a new era of road, vehicle and travel information, provid- ing real-time information to drivers that cars ahead, for example, are experiencing icy or rainy conditions. A wide range of new FCD variables will be added to speeds and locations, making many new applications possible. As a result, fixed detection systems likely will become the exception as opposed to the rule. FCD in Action In January 2011, TomTom launched Custom Travel Times, a historical traffic product that can be used to examine specific routes on the road network. Results can be viewed on a route level to view statistics such as average travel times and percentile values, a reflection of travel-time reliability. It's also possible to zoom into a detailed level of a specific road segment to quickly discover where along the route bottlenecks occur. TomTom's global historical database encom- passes more that 3 trillion measurements. In one of the first applications, TomTom partnered with the city of Aalborg, Denmark, to assess local road congestion in conjunction with the city's "Archimedes project" within the CIVITAS+ framework, a European initiative to find smart traffic solutions for a better environment. By equipping local taxis with consumer navigation devices, taxi drivers in the city of Aalborg provide anonymous GPS measurements to further enrich the historical traffic database already available from TomTom for the Aalborg area. Data from these taxis provide thousands of addi- tional, local GPS measurements to calculate travel times in the area more precisely. The city of Aalborg is applying this content to ensure that the road network is used efficiently, conduct planning for future road- network developments and better inform local drivers of congestion hotspots. Tangible Results Although traffic congestion isn't going to disappear, something can be done to reduce it. The introduction of historical and real-time traffic products, using FCD and XFCD, can help lessen this global problem. Historical traffic products provide accurate traffic lFloating Car Data help to efficiently allocate resources to the network's true problem areas. 28 GEO W ORLD / AUGUST 2O11 information for a wealth of travel-related studies, including accessibility analysis for geomarketing and road-improvement plans for traffic engineers and Vehicle Management