Roads Management Insights is a geospatial analytics product that provides road congestion data for user-defined routes. This data is available both as periodic collections for long-term analysis and as near-real-time streams 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 to address challenges in transportation and public utilities. These solutions drive improvements in road safety, efficiency, and sustainability.
The following are examples of 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 can you do with Roads Management Insights?
You can use 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.
Access channels
You can access this data in your Google Cloud project through two main channels, depending on your selected package:
| Package | Delivery | Update Frequency | Format | Utility |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Foundations | Private data exchange in BigQuery Analytics Hub | Travel durations are updated every 10 minutes. The data is populated in the BigQuery project with 2 hours of delay | BigQuery table | Best for long-term planning, historical analysis, and auditing route performance |
| Real-Time Operations | High-frequency updates are provided through a dedicated Cloud Pub/Sub topic, with data accumulated in BigQuery tables (the data is populated in the BigQuery project with 2 hours of delay) | Travel Durations and Speed Reading Intervals (SRI) are updated every 2 minutes | Structured Protobuf format for low-latency processing | Live operations and dynamic rerouting |
Resources
The following table summarizes the resources available through 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 road data through the following channels: Foundations Package:
|