NAVTEQ Traffic Patterns™ Saves Drivers Up to 42 Hours Per Year in Europe
Recent NAVTEQ research, including more than 145,000 unique route tests in 14 European cities, concluded that NAVTEQ Traffic Patterns saves European drivers 42 hours a year for an average, daily, roundtrip commute of 60 kilometers.
NAVTEQ Traffic Patterns is a robust traffic database that includes typical traffic speeds on nearly 600,000 kilometers of primary and secondary roads across Europe, including Germany, the United Kingdom and France, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Monaco and Andorra. This comprehensive coverage includes nearly 90 percent of the most heavily-traveled roads in Europe, including roads in Berlin, London, Paris and Rome. NAVTEQ Traffic Patterns provides accurate, uninterrupted and seamless information for typical traffic conditions and offers drivers continuous traffic coverage as they travel from one country to the next.
Additionally, testing showed that in major cities, including Paris, London and Berlin, up to 50 percent of typical traffic delays can be avoided with NAVTEQ Traffic Patterns. A cross section of high-traffic cities were tested, including: Berlin, Birmingham, Cologne, Frankfurt, Glasgow, Hamburg, Leeds, London, Lyon, Manchester, Marseille, Munich, Paris and Toulouse.
In Paris, for example, this testing determined that drivers typically experience 134 hours of annual traffic delays, and could save 65 hours using NAVTEQ Traffic Patterns, avoiding 48 percent of these delays yearly. Using this same methodology, commuters in London, who also experience approximately 134 hours of annual delays, could save 39 hours annually using NAVTEQ Traffic Patterns, avoiding 29 percent of typical traffic delays. In Berlin, commuters could save 37 hours and avoid 34 percent of typical delays yearly from approximately 107 hours of annual traffic delays.
Additional findings concluded that NAVTEQ Traffic Patterns:
• Calculated an alternate, time-saving route for up to 50 percent of all routes
• Showed that four out of every five times an alternate route was calculated, it was faster than the original route
• Confirmed that alternate routes are typically calculated more frequently in larger, more congested cities where a denser road network offers a greater number of rerouting options
NAVTEQ Traffic Patterns gives product developers and service providers a reliable, easy-to-use data set for a variety of smart-routing applications. Routing capabilities utilizing NAVTEQ Traffic Patterns give commuters the information they need to decide when and how to avoid typically congested areas. From commuters to commercial fleet operators, NAVTEQ Traffic Patterns enables more accurate route planning and improves trip time estimates based on likely traffic conditions.
NAVTEQ Traffic Patterns is created using multiple years’ observations from GPS probe and sensor data, which is aggregated, verified and then matched to traffic location codes. GPS data from Nokia handsets will be integrated into NAVTEQ Traffic Patterns by the end of 2009.
NAVTEQ Traffic Patterns offers seven daily traffic models covering each day of the week, including 24-hour speed values in 15-minute intervals, which provide the most reliable typical traffic information for specific times of day. NAVTEQ Traffic Patterns robust coverage extends from the largest major motorways down to smaller neighborhood roads, resulting in optimal city routing.
Our editors have the following question.
What if all users start following the alternative routes! The traffic jams will appear there, won’t they?
