Initial Results of Route Lab
Recently, many TripService followers have come across the term Route Lab in presentations, trade shows, and webinars.
We promised that this feature would be available on our Roadstatus platform in Q1. We have kept that promise.
In fact, the first projects have already been completed. In this blog, we’d like to share our initial insights and results.
What is Route Lab?
With Route Lab, you can predict in advance which routes navigation systems will recommend based on planned traffic restrictions. Suppose you close a road and have planned a detour. In that case, you want to be sure that navigation apps like Google Maps or Waze actually recommend this route.
In practice, we often find that navigation systems choose alternative (undesirable) routes, which leads to additional cut-through traffic in residential areas. With Route Lab, you can view these route recommendations in advance. This allows you to make timely adjustments and take action before any disruptions occur.
Data sources
For our analyses, we use four data sources:
- Waze historical data
- TomTom route engine
- Google Maps route engine
- Specific project data
We combine these data sources with our own algorithm. This allows us to generate the most realistic prediction possible of expected driving behavior.
There are two ways to use Route Lab:
1. Per project:
Particularly suitable for government agencies.
- You submit traffic control measures via a traffic control plan
- We process this data in our Traffic Reportal
- Measures are simulated directly for navigation systems
- We analyze routes based on origin and destination
- You will receive a report containing insights and recommendations
2. As a license:
Primarily used by contractors, traffic engineering firms, and consultants.
- Direct access to the tooling
- Perform analyses and iterate on your own
- Adjust scenarios and recalculate
Combine this with a Traffic Portal license to easily incorporate these measures into your analyses.
What are the initial results?
The initial results clearly show that Route Lab works and, above all, provides valuable insights.
Province of Gelderland
The image below shows the recommended routes from the center of Zutphen toward Deventer. Thanks to this information, the province of Gelderland knew what to expect in terms of cut-through traffic. Ultimately, a measure was implemented to stop this cut-through traffic by establishing a “residents-only” zone.
City of Helmond
In the example below from the municipality of Helmond, we see that if the road is not actually closed, the route remains navigable. At this time, we are not yet able to perform an analysis for projects where road capacity is reduced. This is an important lesson for us as we continue to develop the tooling.
What does the ongoing development look like?
Further developments based on the initial results will focus on the following areas:
- Ease of use of the tooling – user interface
- Quality of the analysis
- Further development of the algorithm
In the webinar we’re hosting on Tuesday 6 October at 11:00 am, we’ll give you a glimpse into how we plan to tackle future developments and what other projects we’ve completed. So sign up right away if you’d like to learn more about this product.
Would you like to start using it right away for your project or organization?
