Expand travelTimeAdjustment for geocodes
closed
J
Jeroen
Investigate whether we can expand travelTimeAdjustment with geocode information to configure the adjustment for a certain (e.g. London) area instead of over all.
Log In
Jurriaan Persyn
marked this post as
closed
After multiple discussions between our engineering and solution teams, we decided not to implement geocode-based
travelTimeAdjustment
. This decision is not because we don’t want to support this use case, but because we believe the proposed solution would not work reliably in real-world routing scenarios.We believe the proposed solution (adjusting travel times based on the start and/or end geocode of a route) is flawed by design:
- A route that starts or ends in a low-traffic area can still pass through highly congested regions. And vice versa: going from one end of a city to the other, there might be a way that avoids traffic, if there is a highway around the city. Unfortunately, this route would still get heavily penalized by the geocode-based adjustments. The design flaw is that the proposed approach attaches traffic effects to locations, while in reality traffic exists on road segments over time. As a result, adjustments based on geocodes would still produce inaccurate and often misleading results.
- It would place a significant burden on users to define and continuously maintain adjustment factors per region, which is not user-friendly and hard to keep correct over time.
- As a result, this approach would give a false sense of accuracy while still failing in many realistic routing situations.
To properly account for real-life travel conditions, real traffic support in the maps service is the only robust and future-proof solution. This is why we’re focusing our efforts on that alternative (see Feature Requests).
Do note: This capability requires the use of external traffic data and additional infrastructure, which means it will be offered as a premium feature rather than as part of the default routing behavior. Customers who are interested in real traffic support are encouraged to contact us so we can discuss requirements and pricing and align on next steps.
Kind regards,
Jurriaan Persyn
H
Harry Pickthall
This issue is quite significant, having gathered more info from our planning team it arises across most major cities in the UK although obviously London is the worst affected.
It's particularly an issue where max travel limits have been agreed with engineers and then broken
Jurriaan Persyn
marked this post as
under review