Introduction
What are Historical Traffic Volumes?
Traffic volumes are used to understand passing trade, captive markets, and traffic flow. Governments, local authorities, and industries such as retail, real estate, geomarketing, and insurance use traffic volumes to analyze road networks and make high-impact decisions. Yet these industries have long been held back by traditional hardware-based survey methods: hardware is costly and time-consuming, requiring extensive investments of time, money, and manpower for small-scale results. This makes it difficult to capture representative conditions across vast road networks, and inconsistent data leads to suboptimal planning and operational decisions in both the public and private sectors.
TomTom Historical Traffic Volumes overcomes these barriers. Our machine-learning solution combines the latest data modeling techniques with TomTom’s trusted map data, probe data, and historical automatic traffic counter data.
As a result, Historical Traffic Volumes provides quick access to widespread, highly accurate volumes data almost instantly, at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. It empowers you to analyze historical road network dynamics at scale and take informed action to improve efficiency and use, as well as economic and environmental impacts.
What Historical Traffic Volumes delivers
Historical Traffic Volumes delivers three quantities for each road segment:
| Quantity | What it is | Values per road segment and year | Accuracy documented in |
|---|---|---|---|
| AADT | Annual average daily traffic: the number of vehicles that pass the segment on an average day of the year | 1 | Annual averages: accuracy and validation |
| AAWHT | Annual average week-hour traffic: the typical volume for each hour of each day of the week | 168 | Annual averages: accuracy and validation |
| Hourly volumes | The estimate for one specific hour on one specific date | One per hour of the year, where covered | Hourly volumes: accuracy and validation |
A rule of thumb: a typical value is AADT or AAWHT; a value for one specific date and hour is an hourly volume. The accuracy of each quantity is validated against permanent traffic counters and documented per year in the accuracy and validation documents of this documentation.
How to access Historical Traffic Volumes
Historical Traffic Volumes data is available in two ways:
Via the TomTom MOVE web platform, through the following products:
Via batch delivery — reach out to your TomTom sales representative or contact our sales team to get started.
Application areas
- Traffic management — Prioritize network management and inform operational decision-making.
- Traffic planning and modelling — Perform before-and-after analyses, evaluate road network performance, and build more robust and representative road traffic models.
- Businesses — Drive informed decisions that positively impact financial outcomes.
- Geomarketing and out-of-home (OOH) advertising — Use highly detailed traffic volume data to determine optimal locations for marketing assets and generate the most visibility and impact.
- Insurance — Incorporate road network use into risk models to offer competitive premiums.
- Financial markets — Access leading indicators for data-driven financial and investment decision-making.
- Retail and commercial real estate — Improve site evaluation, marketing, and property valuations.
- Lawmakers and policy makers — Inform budgeting and prioritize transport budgets and projects.
- Fleet and logistics — Optimize routes and operations.
- Ride hailing — Boost efficiency for ride planning.