Trafficmaster data to help DfT improve UK’s traffic flow

Trafficmaster’s journey time data will soon be helping the Department for Transport, its agencies and local authorities, by identifying congestion hotspots and measuring the impact of schemes to improve traffic flow on the UK’s roads, in a new three-year contract.

The company will share journey time information combined from its real road speed data, provided by its 50,000 Smartnav customers, and traffic incident data generated by its nationwide sensor network.

Trafficmaster’s road speed data allows it to identify all roads across the UK by the average speeds they are actually driven, rather than by their speed limit. This provides far more accurate picture of any poor road or junction layouts and offers a comprehensive assessment of traffic flow by time of day and day of week, to improve satellite navigation route calculations. Additional live incident reports from Trafficmaster’s 7,500 roadside sensors across the country show the effects on traffic congestion on our roads, minute by minute.

Together, Trafficmaster’s senor network and Smartnav customers generate over 200 million data records each day and Trafficmaster has now amassed over 70 billion data records. The company already uses this information to help its Smartnav customers navigate around congestion and traffic blackspots, and supplies traffic and travel information to 35 GCap regional radio stations.

Trafficmaster Chief Executive, Tony Eales, commented: “This significant contract for Trafficmaster is reflection of the quality of our information on traffic flow. We look forward to assisting the authorities with their transport planning and congestion reduction initiatives and we will continue to develop our data services to improve understanding of Britain’s congestion picture.

“This also demonstrates the power and potential of our real road speed data, which has been delivering improved navigation routes for our Smartnav customers for over 12 months.”