Europe News: Trafficmaster maps quickest routes in the UK

Trafficmaster has developed a new picture of Britain’s roads, applying real road speeds to determine the top five quickest routes.

Trafficmaster has collated more than fifty billion data records to map accurate average speeds for roads across the UK.

By combining data from Smartnav in-car navigation systems and its nationwide traffic sensor network, Trafficmaster can now find the quickest route by identifying roads at their real average traffic speeds, rather than relying on their speed limits. <

In doing so, Trafficmaster has identified those roads where traffic flows freely and those where traffic flow speeds are often much lower than the posted speed limit. This includes many country roads with speed limits of 60mph, but where traffic often moves much more slowly than that, because they are narrow with many sharp bends.

Trafficmaster can also pinpoint the slowest routes in the UK, by the same average traffic flow speed measures, which can make it easy to avoid slow road sections and junctions.

This work follows the findings of the recent Trafficmaster and RAC Foundation study into UK traffic congestion, which identified the UK’s commuter congestion hotspots and illustrated how using smart routes could save hours on the road.

Trafficmaster and the RAC Foundation believe the ability to navigate by real road speeds and around jams could help reduce congestion for all drivers whiles reducing its environmental impact.

According to Trafficmaster spokesman Philip Hale, you can’t tell which routes at what times will be the quickest just by looking at a map, and most sat nav systems base their route calculations only on speed limits.

“Now we can get smarter, identifying the best routes by their real speeds and matching this with our congestion data, so we have proper local knowledge for the roads in your area, on top of being able to tell you where the jams are,” said Hale.