The HERE Traffic Dashboard reveals the detailed workings of city roads

The wealth of information revealed by the HERE Traffic Dashboard is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the questions our data can answer.

A traffic map as an application, like the routing maps you see on your phone or in your in-dash navigation, answers an extremely specific use case. You plot a route between A and B, you color the map, you give an ETA – and that’s it!

But there is much more behind traffic data. Frankly, a better, richer story exists in the data we collect, and in how we put that data to use.

To begin to understand the size and power of that data, consider that we are already processing more than 100 billion data points every month. 100 different data providers share information to us that we collect, aggregate and process. Then, as one small service, we look at current traffic along your route, and we color the map. This is actually pretty easy.

On the other hand, when you look at the traffic dashboard that we’re bringing to ITS World Congress this week, you see into a completely different dimension. You can see congestion levels over time and see how those levels evolve and fluctuate as part of a daily cycle.

Putting this data to good use is something we as a company consistently strive for. We have the intelligence to process the information and to build new insights based on that data that are not obvious from simpler forms of traffic mapping applications.

This is where the HERE Open Location Platform comes into play. The HERE Open Location Platform takes in all this data from disparate sources and makes it uniform – which in turn opens up many more possibilities than you see in a regular traffic application. Instead of providing a narrow-ended use case, we can work with cities and companies and allow them to ask any questions they want, and we can find and provide the answers from the data.

Think about cities who can benefit from getting a perfect fingerprint of what traffic looks like based on historic data and real-time data incidents that our systems collect. Here in one place is the huge, diverse collection of data points a city official would need in order to make extremely intelligent decisions about how to manage traffic in the future.

Nobody likes traffic. But nobody alone can solve the problems it causes. For this we need more collaboration between the public and the private sectors to offer better services. With the HERE Traffic Dashboard we provide insights into the vast amount of traffic information – from real-time to historical traffic data to sophisticated traffic analytics – that we can provide drivers, cities and businesses for more informed decision making.

If you’re visiting ITS World Congress in Copenhagen this week, I hope you’ll come to visit and see more about how we’re putting data to work to answer tough questions on the roads. Or, I invite you to explore the HERE Traffic Dashboard right now. Let us know what you think of it!