Inside TomTom's traffic products: Traffic Incidents

Has an accident caused a traffic jam? Have construction works blocked lanes? Has a public event closed entire streets? Discover how TomTom Traffic Incidents keep drivers and navigation systems updated about road closures and events on the road, so they can stay one step ahead of disruption and enjoy safer, less stressful journeys.

All drivers want to reach their destinations without delay, whether they’re dropping their kids off at school or dropping off ride-sharing passengers at the airport. But the reality is that road and traffic conditions are changing all the time. Incidents like accidents or road works can easily bring traffic to a standstill or require confusing detours, extending travel times and creating headaches for road users.

While drivers can’t always avoid bad traffic, with TomTom Traffic Incidents, they can make smarter choices to get around congestion and closed roads, and get where they want to go, swiftly and safely. What goes into building this helpful source of real-time traffic information? What are the benefits that TomTom’s solution brings to drivers, navigation apps and autonomous driving systems? Let’s find out.

All about TomTom Traffic Incidents

TomTom Traffic Incidents provides information about current observed congestion and traffic-related incidents on roads in all countries where TomTom Traffic is available (around 84 countries at time of writing). It covers a wide range of traffic incidents, such as traffic jams, road closures, lane closures, construction zones and other road incidents.

Road closures in downtown Phoenix, Arizona visualized on the map with Traffic Incidents.

TomTom’s solution returns detailed information on individual incidents, including their start and end location, road name, type of delay, length of delay (in time), significance and distance from a user’s current location.

For traffic jams specifically, the tech indicates the jam tendency — whether it’s improving, remaining stable or getting worse — and the jam lifetime, which is its expected duration. On top of this, Traffic Incidents provides information on possible future jams, indicating congestion that’s likely to occur in the future, and predicts how current traffic jams will evolve, including their position and likely traffic speed at different points.

Driving better navigation

The real-time information provided by Traffic Incidents makes for safer, more efficient and faster navigation and routing. When integrated into a routing application or navigation system, Traffic Incidents helps calculate how real-road events and congestion impact travel times on different routes. For example, a certain route might be the shortest way to a particular destination under normal conditions, but that can change if construction works are taking place on part of the journey. TomTom Traffic Incidents can detect this disruption, determine the likely delay and re-direct users onto a potentially longer, but ultimately faster route. This has the added benefits of reducing travel times, fuel use and emissions not to mention stress for drivers.

Data from Traffic Incidents can be integrated with personal and professional navigation apps and onboard solutions too, for traffic-aware navigation and visualization. It can display incidents like traffic jams and closed roads clearly on the navigation map, giving drivers visual alerts about what to expect on the road ahead.

Traffic Incidents can be used to visualize upcoming traffic incidents on PNDs and navigation apps, helping drivers stay alert and informed.

It’s not just about what happens on the dash, though, but also behind it.

Real-time traffic information is also critical for supporting advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). With Traffic Incidents capable of detecting incidents at the lane level, it provides the granular detail that’s essential for safe autonomous and assisted driving features.

This means that if Traffic Incidents knows about lanes closed for roadworks and renovation on a highway, for instance, it could work with ADAS to guide a vehicle into a clear lane. If the roadworks ahead are complex, with contraflow and varying lane widths for example, the solution can even alert the driver to take full control before they reach the potential hazard, adding safety by extending the vision of the ADAS tech beyond its cameras.

Powered by top-notch traffic data

Keeping track of what’s happening on every road, in more than 80 countries, at all times, isn’t easy. Traffic Incidents obtains this authoritative view of traffic conditions thanks to TomTom’s unmatched data sources and powerful analytics.

To deliver the most up-to-date and accurate traffic data to technologies like Traffic Incidents, TomTom gathers billions of anonymized floating car data (FCD) points from a vast network of connected devices, including GPS probes.

Monika Pepikj, TomTom Traffic Product Manager, says: “TomTom captures information from one in every five cars on the road. Because we pick up signals directly from the road, we can provide a very accurate picture of traffic and incidents as they occur and evolve.”

On top of its own real-time traffic data, TomTom adds information provided by government agencies and road authorities. This can include details about planned road closures, construction works or upcoming events, like marathons or parades.

TomTom’s fusion engine intelligently combines the data from all available sources into a useful database of traffic events, with traffic data updated every 30 seconds for maximum freshness. This provides an extremely detailed and accurate baseline of traffic and incidents on roads all over the globe.

Customers can gain access to the rich insights provided by Traffic Incidents in a variety of ways. The solution is delivered as a RESTful API, for easy integration into an organization’s own systems and applications. TomTom also makes Traffic Incidents available through its End-User Traffic and Intermediate Traffic feeds for further flexibility.

Here, Traffic Incidents combines with another traffic product, TomTom Traffic Flow, which offers real-time information on road speeds and travel times (you can learn more about how Traffic Flow works in this article). Together, these two traffic solutions provide one of the most complete pictures of traffic movements and road speeds available today.

Monika Pepikj notes: “For the best traffic insights, we recommend that customers use both solutions. With Traffic Flow, users can understand overall traffic movements and speeds. Layering Traffic Incidents on top of that offers insights into specific events impacting traffic. Altogether, it adds up to an incredibly comprehensive view of what’s happening on the road, so drivers are ready for anything that the journey brings.”