Predictive traffic data to revolutionise navigation and trip planning
Commercial solutions are expected to be available in 2009.
"While real-time traffic solutions are useful for traffic congestion avoidance and improved calculation of the fastest route, they remain limited by their lack of forecasting accuracy," says ABI Research director Dominique Bonte. "The increased reliability offered by traffic prediction models will contribute to traffic services reaching a mature phase, increasing consumers' willingness to pay and driving uptake to more than 300 million users by 2013."
Predictive traffic will enable time-dependent routing, which takes into account future traffic conditions along the route. It will also enable accurate and reliable up-front trip planning on fixed mapping sites such as MapQuest.
Proactive traffic alert messages will enable consumers to modify or postpone their journeys, and improved ETA accuracy will increase the efficiency of trip and resource planning.
While the emergence of real-time two-way connected navigation devices for uploading driver profile and behaviour information will be an important driver for predictive traffic solutions, hybrid solutions based on local clients will dominate in the near future.
However, challenges related to user education, processing power and latency, and interactive user interfaces must be overcome before new forecast-based traffic use cases will be embraced by a large number of drivers.
