It is very well known that traffic patterns change extremely fast and fluctuate a lot from location to location. At the same time even short term and very local increase of traffic demand can influence congestion dynamics significantly.
Since most of current traffic data originated from navigation systems, which observe road segments of several miles long and from traffic detectors, which installations are limited to few important roads and intersections, a lot of professionals have to rely on ‘modeled’ or ‘averaged’ data, which could be far from the reality.
That is why it is extremely effective to base transportation planning or traffic network improvement on High Resolution (Hi-Res) traffic data, which provides far better vision of traffic patterns for any particular location – up to an exact address.
Ticon provides Hi-Res traffic data due to optimal structuring of road network and observation of a great number of data points of different origination. In contrast other providers observe just long TMC/XD segments and/or traffic counters.
The graph below shows how these two different approaches are applied to the real road – city portion of I-80 highway (Reno, NV).
On this particular portion of the highway Ticon provided 27 data points instead on just 5 delivered by the competitor (Provider I). As a result, the data provided by the competitor is over averaged and therefore misleading.
In particular, Ticon shows five different levels of traffic volumes as well as five significant speed changes along this portion of the road, while the Competitor – only three.
That is why the use of Ticon Hi-Res data provides clear understanding of the changes of the traffic demand at each entrance/exit (or other key points) of the road, as oppose to competitor’s low resolution data highly averaged over much longer distances, which fuzzes out these important traffic regularities.
Clear understanding of traffic demands, pattern and regularities is obviously the key to optimal transportation planning and mobility improvements.