Before setting off for a destination, it’s always nice to be able to estimate how long it will take to get there. But nowadays, with roads too often congested and the risk more and more frequent of finding yourself in the middle of a traffic jam, the calculation is not always easy to do. Sometimes even impossible.
Posted at 5:45 p.m.
However, this type of problem can now be easily solved with technology that saves road users a lot of hassle. This is a new system called “Advanced Real-Time Traffic Information” (ITTRA for short), an information service that provides information of unprecedented accuracy on the speed of vehicles traveling on the roads. the busiest and most unpredictable in terms of traffic jams.
We are talking here about a service that allows you to see congestion on the roads and highways of 70 countries, which sneaks into city centers and which covers more than 100 cities around the world on all types of roads, roads from countryside to highways via urban roads.
This technology may be familiar to you since a real-time traffic service already exists. It provides up-to-the-minute information on traffic flows, allows us to calculate our route based on traffic and estimate our arrival time.
The ITTRA goes further, however, and allows the driver to be informed of traffic to the nearest 100 m, nothing less. It calculates delays and recommends detours to make your life easier. In short, it allows the road user to choose the best routes within their reach to get to the desired destination.
But again, communication is changing. With the ITTRA, it is no longer between users, but between vehicles and the road, an essential key to safe driving.
Communication and security go hand in hand
Some drivers are already familiar with applications such as Waze, which allow someone to manually notify road users of the existence of debris on the road, or even to warn them of a police presence on a particular lane. But today, no manipulation is required since it is sensors installed inside the vehicles that do the work automatically, and that transmit the information directly.
Thanks to all these sensors and data communication, drivers will be more aware than ever of potential dangers. Let’s think of a place where the road is covered in black ice, for example, or of this other sector where deer have been detected. Informed meters, or even kilometers in advance, drivers will be able to anticipate the danger and modify their driving before arriving in a dangerous zone.
Being able to see a hazard coming will help drivers avoid many accidents. This communication between road and car is the way of the future. It allows us to focus our attention in the right place at the right time. Ultimately, it will be more valuable than any road sign.
A technology signed HERE
HERE Technologies, a global data and location services platform, announced this new and improved service last October.
To be optimal, its technology collects billions of GPS data points every day by exploiting some 150 different probe data providers and more than 100 event sources. This is without counting the data it collects from the famous sensors from millions of connected vehicles.
The service is accessible by means of a subscription offered on the HERE platform, with à la carte or monthly rates. At the moment, the service is offered free of charge, if not at minimal costs.
The collateral benefits
All of this data, which helps to identify how vehicles move on the road network, is enough to delight motorists, but is also extremely useful for many other types of users.
We need only think of companies in the automotive and road transport sectors, and even of employees who work for cities. All use it in their own way to identify mobility patterns on our roads.
Technology can improve urban planning, infrastructure management and traffic signal synchronization, just as it can improve public safety through precise knowledge of road risks.
Fine traffic analysis is valuable these days. It is all the more so in the context of the pandemic that we are experiencing, with all these episodes of confinement and working from home which are changing traffic habits all over the world. Like what technology sticks to our era in a particularly suitable way.