Inrix Updates Historical Average Speeds Traffic Model

INRIX announced the upcoming availability of the latest version of its historical traffic speeds product, Nationwide Average Speeds (NAS) version 2.0. Designed for navigation application providers and device manufacturers to improve the accuracy of fastest route calculations, NAS provides “typical” or average speeds and travel times in as short as 5 minute increments for each day of the week, by season and for holidays across all major freeways, highways and arterial roads throughout the U.S.

Gotta love this stuff; we all know that traffic slows up during peak travel times, and that GPS units don't yet have the ability to predict travel times through these highly trafficed (clogged) areas, so the estimates are always off. This data capability will make better prdictions for travel times and teamed up with traffic reporting (i.e. TMC) you can get some pretty solid traffic capabilities.

Key things to pull from this press release below:
1) These are coming this Fall; apparently demand from manufacturers is big. I predict it will be a big demand among consumers too if priced right.
2) For devices that use GPRS.... can you say "TomTom"?
3) Great explaination on how this Inrix data will work (below)

ReadMore from the press release below...

To calculate average speeds, INRIX leverages over 5 billion specific data points from the past two years from the INRIX Smart Dust Network, combining data from over 650,000 GPS-enabled vehicles and virtually all of the DOT road sensors across the country. Additionally, leveraging INRIX’s unique Bayesian predictive analytics, NAS 2.0 features typical traffic on both major and minor U.S. holidays, as well as the more severely congested days leading into holidays.

Point #1 - Prediction of When These Devices will hit the Market
“The demand from leading auto navigation suppliers and portable navigation and mobile device OEMs for this product has been so strong that the first navigation devices using our historical traffic will ship this fall,” said INRIX CEO, Bryan Mistele .

Point #2 - TomTom Uses GPRS....
INRIX customers are integrating NAS 2.0 in several scenarios. In devices and applications with no or limited connectivity, historical traffic is integrated with the map data and embedded on the device. For devices that can receive dynamic traffic over the Web, GPRS or via broadcast networks, customers are actively integrating the “best data available” for the particular application and use case, leveraging INRIX traffic data from 750,000 miles of historical traffic flow (the baseline), over 55,000 miles of real-time flow in 94 markets across the country, and nearly 35,000 miles of dynamic predictive flow. Overall, INRIX continues to provide the broadest traffic flow coverage in North America .

Point #3 - Explanation of How this Works
Featuring highly accurate typical speeds for individual road segments on over 750,000 miles of U.S. roadways, Nationwide Average Speeds includes a range of flexible features optimized for navigation. Speeds are provided in increments as short as 5 minutes and are specific to the actual day of the week and time of day covering 24 hours a day, 7 days a week plus holidays, by season. While most navigation systems today calculate the fastest route and estimated time of arrival based upon the posted (static) speed limit for segments of roadways, Nationwide Average Speeds enables significantly higher accuracy based upon typical traffic congestion during specific times of day. For example, the speed limit on Interstate 5 throughout the Seattle metropolitan area is posted at 60 miles per hour (mph), however INRIX calculates typical speeds on every road segment (typically 1-3 miles) in the area, showing the average speed on I-5 North at the I-90 interchange as 26 miles per hour (mph) on Mondays at 7:30am in the fall and 42 mph on Wednesdays at 5:45pm in the summer.

Nationwide Average Speeds is easily integrated with map data at the TMC road segment level and also with TeleAtlas map data edge or segment IDs. INRIX can also provide custom solutions including additional statistics for each road segment such as percentage points of the speed distribution (beyond the average 50%), allowing travel time reliability calculations to be made, and percent of time for each segment that the speed is below 60 mph, 50 mph and 35 mph by time of day and day of week – modeling the ‘breakdown rates’ typically used in the public sector to measure roadway performance reliability. Additionally, customers have the ability to specify exact time ranges for average speed calculation and other statistics for each road segment. Furthermore, Nationwide Average Speeds is configurable for each customer scenario with regard to data granularity and features to the meet the specific accuracy requirements, processing power and space constraints of any specific navigation device.

INRIX Nationwide Average Speeds 2.0 will be available to customers in August, 2007.

July 18, 2007

Inrix Updates Historical Average Speeds Traffic Model