Access Google s Traffic Data through a Web Service

Question

Is there a way I can access traffic data that Google provides through a web service   There seems to be a GTrafficOverlay that puts traffic on top of a route on an embedded google map  but no direct web service that I can consume to  say  give the source and the destination and find the traffic between them   Is there any other source I can get this data from

User · Answer

Maybe you should have a look at Mapquests Traffic API: http://www.mapquestapi.com/traffic/

The webservice is unfortunately only available for some citys in the US, I think. But probably it solves your problem.

User · Answer

In India we are using http   www itrafficnews com  But the data is posted by the users  I dont think google will provide the data

User · Answer

You might want to take a look at HERE MAP SERVICE  They have direct traffic data you can use  which is exactly what you need  https   developer here com api-explorer rest traffic traffic-flow-bounding-box  For example  by querying an area of interest  you might get something like this        RWS                  RW                          FIS                                  FI                                          TMC                          PC   32483                       DE    SOHO                        QD                             LE   0 71682                                         CF                                                  TY    TR                          SP   9 1                         SU   9 1                         FF   17                         JF   3 2911                         CN   0 9                                                                                                               This example shows a current average speed SU of 9 1  where the free flow speed FF would be 17  The Jam factor JF is 3 3  which is still considered free flow but getting sluggish  The units used  miles km  can be defined in the API call  To avoid dealing with TMC locations  you can ask for geocoordinates of the road segments by adding responseattributes sh in the request   The abbreviations used can be found here Interpreting HERE Maps real-time traffic tags          RWS  - A list of Roadway  RW  items     RW    This is the composite    item for flow across an entire roadway  A roadway item will be    present for each roadway with   traffic flow information available    FIS    A list of Flow Item  FI  elements     FI    A single flow item    TMC    An ordered collection of TMC locations     PC    Point TMC Location Code     DE    Text description of the road     QD    Queuing direction      or  -   Note this is the opposite of the travel    direction in the fully qualified ID  For example for   location    107 03021 the QD would be  -      LE    Length of the stretch of road     The units are defined in the file header     CF    Current Flow  This    element contains details about speed and Jam Factor information for    the given flow item      CN    Confidence  an indication of how the    speed was determined  -1 0 road closed  1 0 100  0 7-100  Historical    Usually   a value between  7 and 1 0  FF    The free flow speed on this   stretch of road      JF    The number between 0 0 and 10 0 indicating    the expected quality of travel  When there is a road closure  the Jam    Factor   will be 10  As the number approaches 10 0 the quality of    travel is   getting worse  -1 0 indicates that a Jam Factor could not    be   calculated     SP    Speed  based on UNITS  capped by speed limit    SU    Speed  based on UNITS  not capped by speed limit     TY    Type    information for the given Location Referencing container  This may be    freely defined string      Also the source comes from  https   developer here com rest-apis documentation traffic topics additional-parameters html

User · Answer

There is no way  or at least no reasonably easy and convenient way  to get the raw traffic data from Google Maps Javascript API v3   Even if you could do it  doing so is likely to violate some clause in the Terms Of Service for Google Maps   You would have to get this information from another service   I doubt there is a free service that provides this information at the current time  but I would love it if someone proved me wrong on that   As  crdzoba points out  Bing Maps API exposes some traffic data  Perhaps that can fill your needs  It s not clear from the documentation how much traffic data that exposes as it s only data about  incidents   Slow traffic due to construction would be in there  but it s not obvious to me whether slow traffic due simply to volume would be   UPDATE  March 2016   A lot has happened since this answer was written in 2011  but the core points appear to hold up  You won t find raw traffic data in free API services  at least not for the U S   and probably not most other places   But if you don t mind paying a bit and or if you just need things like  travel time for a specific route taking traffic into consideration  you have options   Anto s answer  for example  points to Google s Maps For Work as a paid API service that allows you to get travel times taking traffic into consideration

User · Answer

I don t think Google will provide this API  And traffic data not only contains the incident data   Today many online maps show city traffic  but they have not provide the API for the developer  We even don t know where they get the traffic data  Maybe the government has the data   So I think you could think about it from another direction  For example  there are many social network website out there  Everybody could post the traffic information on the website  We can collection these information to get the traffic status  Or maybe we can create a this type website   But that type traffic data  talked about above  is not accurate  Even the information provided by human will be wrong    Luckily I found that my city now provides an Mobile App called  Real-time Bus Information   It could tell the citizen where the bus is now  and when will arrive at the bus station  And I sniff the REST API in this App  The data from REST API give the important data  for example the lat and lon  and also the bus speed  And it s real-time data  So I think we could compute the traffic status from these data  by some programming   Here is some sample data   https   github com sp-chenyang bus blob master sample data bjgj aibang com 8899 bjgj php city linename stationno datatype type json  Even the bus data will not enough to compute the accurate real-time traffic status  Incidents  traffic light and other things will affect the traffic status  But I think this is the beginning   At the end  I think you could try to find whether your city provides these data   PS  I am always thinking that life will be better for people in the future   but not now

User · Answer

There is a project called Open Traffic which is not fully functional right now but seems to be the right answer in the future       OpenTraffic is a global data platform to process anonymous positions of vehicles and smartphones into real-time and historical traffic statistics  We re building this in the open  using fully open-source software  with involvement from a growing list of partners

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Bing Maps API has a REST service that returns traffic info  http   msdn microsoft com en-us library hh441725

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It is possible to get traffic data  Below is my implementation in python  The API has some quota  amp  is not fully free  but good enough for small projects  import requests import time import json   while True       url    https   maps googleapis com maps api distancematrix json       querystring     units   metric   departure time  str int time time      traffic model   best guess   origins   ITPL Bangalore   destinations   Tin Factory Bangalore   key   GetYourKeyHere        headers              cache-control    no-cache            postman-token    something                 response   requests request  GET   url  headers headers  params querystring      d   json loads response text      print  On   time strftime   I  M  S    time duration is  d  rows   0   elements   0   duration    text       amp  traffic time is   d  rows   0   elements   0   duration in traffic    text        time sleep 1800      print response text    Response is  -         destination addresses              Tin Factory  Swamy Vivekananda Rd  Krishna Reddy Industrial Estate  Dooravani Nagar  Bengaluru  Karnataka 560016  India              origin addresses              Whitefield Main Rd  Pattandur Agrahara  Whitefield  Bengaluru  Karnataka 560066  India              rows                            elements                                            distance                              text    10 5 km                            value   10505                                             duration                              text    35 mins                            value   2120                                             duration in traffic                              text    45 mins                            value   2713                                             status    OK                                                        status    OK      You need to pass  departure time  str int time time     is a required query string parameter for traffic information    Your traffic information would be present in duration in traffic   Refer this documentation for more info   https   developers google com maps documentation distance-matrix intro traffic-model

User · Answer

Rather than trying to pull the raw traffic data  you can try a different approach  The Google Directions API allows you to query the api with a particular route and returns a JSON string or XML element as a result   This result includes the element -   duration in traffic   This indicates the total duration of the particular leg of the journey  taking into account current traffic conditions   for information on  leg  and other elements of the JSON string returned by the Directions API refer link below   https   developers google com maps documentation directions  JSON I haven t tried this myself but just something I came across in the documentation

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Apparently the information is available using the Google Directions API in its professional edition Maps for work   According to the API s documentation      Note  Maps for Work users must include client and signature parameters with their requests instead of a key            duration in traffic indicates the total duration of this leg  taking into account current traffic conditions  The duration in traffic will only be returned if all of the following are true          The directions request includes a departure time parameter set to a value within a few minutes of the current time    The request includes a valid Google Maps API for Work client and signature parameter    Traffic conditions are available for the requested route    The directions request does not include stopover waypoints

[google-maps-api-3] Access Google's Traffic Data through a Web Service

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