Navigation and traffic information provider TomTom announced at the ITS World Congress in Melbourne, Australia, this week that its City system has now been extended to 100 cities worldwide in the first six months since its launch.
TomTom’s City service is also now available in six different languages and covers six continents. The addition of a further 50 cities means that, in total, over 175 million people can now benefit from the information system that allows them to help them plan their journeys better. The traffic portal is a showcase for the extensive range of traffic information available on a city-by-city basis and provides a platform to connect traffic authorities, businesses and citizens to jointly manage sustainable and efficient mobility. It provides freely accessible content showing live traffic status and incidents and other driver-based information in cities.
Announcing the expansion, Ralf-Peter Schäfer, TomTom’s head of traffic, said, “Our City service has proved popular so it’s great to extend it by another 50 cities. Alongside the launch of our Traffic Center, we are really showing the extensive capabilities we have to help optimize the road network for everyone, and we’ll continue to add functionality to the site. This is a further step in our mission to help reduce delays for all drivers and pave the way to smarter cities by using data from over 450 million GPS devices globally.”
TomTom has also announced the launch of Traffic Stats API, a new service to access the company’s historical and real-time speed and travel time data that it collects from its community of users. The Traffic Stats product is based on the large volume of GPS data TomTom collects every day for traffic analytics; with access to data from over 450 million devices, around 461 million miles (742m km) of driven trips are added every day. The company has recently expanded its service so that users in the USA, South Africa, Canada and India are able to benefit from extended analytics.
The web services are RESTful APIs that can easily be incorporated into traffic management and GIS applications. The Traffic Stats APIs are based on the collection of floating car data (FCD), a proven and innovative method of measuring what is happening on the road. The Traffic Stats API and User Interface allows traffic experts to design their own queries on the historical GPS data and answer questions about accessibility, congestion bottlenecks and travel time stability.
Schäfer noted, “Traffic Stats gives traffic experts relevant insight into the traffic behavior required for policy makers to make the right decisions for the future. Our significant historical and real-time data will help deliver a smarter mobility for all, and will help substantially reduce traffic jams in the future.”
TomTom is also participating in a joint autonomous driving demonstration with Bosch at the World Congress. The company provided its HD Map and RoadDNA technology to set up a demonstration on the Australian F1 Grand Prix circuit at Albert Park, where the products enable Bosch’s demo vehicle to perform in autonomous mode.
