Roads Management Insights overview

Roads Management Insights is a geospatial analytics product that accepts user-defined routes to provide trip duration and speed reading intervals data. This data is available as periodically collected data to build long-term analysis datasets and as near real-time data for event updates.

Why use Roads Management Insights?

With Roads Management Insights, you can use road data to develop solutions for managing road networks and address challenges in transportation and public utilities. These solutions drive improvements in road safety, efficiency, and sustainability.

The following are examples on how you can use Roads Management Insights:

  • Develop systems to identify and mitigate high-risk road segments with the objective of reducing road crashes and injuries.
  • Design traffic pattern analysis tools to optimize road network flow, reduce congestion, and shorten travel times.
  • Build applications that analyze traffic patterns to identify correlations with vehicular emissions, contributing to air quality improvements and sustainable urban planning.

What you can do with Roads Management Insights?

You can use the Roads Management Insights to include the following capabilities in your applications:

  • Create, manage and analyze custom routes datasets: Accumulate routes data over time using BigQuery.
  • Access near real-time road condition updates: Receive live streams of data using Pub/Sub.

How Roads Management Insights works

Roads Management Insights provides road data by integrating the Roads Selection API, BigQuery, and Pub/Sub.

Use the Roads Selection API to begin collecting road data by defining and submitting specific routes. This API accepts requests containing latitude and longitude coordinates that specify origins, destinations, and intermediate waypoints for a route.

The API then validates the submitted routes against criteria such as jurisdiction and road utility. Upon validation, the API begins sending continuous updates of the following road data for the selected routes:

  • Trip duration: The calculated travel time for a route. This includes both the traffic-aware duration, which accounts for current traffic conditions, and the static duration, which is traffic-unaware.
  • Speed reading intervals: The traffic density indicator on a route. This data indicates if vehicles on the route are traveling at a normal speed with no traffic delays, if there is a slowdown detected with medium amount of traffic, or if there are considerable traffic delays.

You can access this data though your Google Cloud project through two main channels:

  • BigQuery: Accumulated road data is available in dedicated BigQuery tables. This data includes travel duration, speed reading intervals (SRIs), and route geometry for each selected route. These tables are shared with your project through a private data exchange in BigQuery (Analytics Hub).
  • Pub/Sub: Near real-time traffic updates every 2 minutes. These updates are available in a dedicated Cloud Pub/Sub topic associated with your project. Each message contains traffic details such as travel duration and speed reading intervals in a defined Protobuf format.

Resources

The following table summarizes the resources available through the Roads Management Insights along with the data it returns.

Data resources Description
Roads Selection API API endpoints like create, batchCreate, get, delete, list to define and manage segments for data collection.
BigQuery data tables A continuously updated dataset of road information accessible through Analytics Hub.
Cloud Pub/Sub topic A messaging service providing near real-time traffic updates for subscribed routes.

How to use Roads Management Insights

1 Set up Start with Set up your project and complete the instructions that follow.
2 Create routes Use the Roads Selection API to create and submit the specific routes to collect data from. See Create selected routes.
3 Access your data Access data on your selected routes through the following channels: