Out of interest, don't they all use the same traffic system in the UK? The trafficmaster traffic api system is really the only game in town isn't it (aside from GMaps/Waze which is P2P traffic I guess)
No. The trafficmaster api feeds info to other providers.
The main players are:
- Tomtom - use 'floating car data' (basically P2P) from all vodaphone handsets, all iphones, and all Tomtom Live PNDs and apps to generate live traffic flow data, theoretically covering any road on their map. Also get data from Highways Agency, Traffic Scotland, TfL and a small number of local authorities. Their maps also have road speeds based on historic data split into 15 minute segments and a 7 day week.
- Google - use 'floating car data' from all Android handsets, plus traffic incidents from Waze. Road coverage limited compared to Tomtom.
- 'Here' (formerly Navteq / Nokia) - trafficmaster plus floating car data for TMC tables - which cover most of the 'Strategic road network' (i.e. mainly motorways and A roads)
- Inrix (formerly ITIS), get data from roadworks.org (which includes closure data from the Highways Agency, Traffic Scotland, plus floating car data from Google. They have a TMC table based product and an 'XD Traffic' product which has similar road coverage to Google. They are the ones that provide traffic info to local news stations and broadcast the 'RDS-TMC' feed via FM radio that a lot of in-car satnavs (and non live satnavs) use.
- Elgin - see roadworks.org. Gets their incident data from HA, TS, TfL and vast majority of local authorities. Syndicates data with Google, Inrix, Here. Gets their traffic flow data from Google.
It's all a bit incestuous really. For example the Inrix android app includes all of Elgin's incident data and uses Google maps but is unfortunately not a turn-by-turn navigation system.
Basically if Tomtom ever get their hands on the roadworks.org portal data (which they are in discussions to do) it's the end game for potential improvements. I can hardly imagine a better system. The same could be achievable if Google feed their floating car data and the roadworks.org portal data into Waze's routing system and enable traffic coverage for all roads.
Edit:
Of the above, Tomtom, Sygic (badly implemented though) and Route 66 Navigate use Tomtom data. Co-pilot uses Here data. Garmin and Navigon use the limited version of Inrix data. Google uses whatever the monopolies and mergers people can't stop them using (currently their own traffic flow data and Waze reported incidents - this is basically the Internet Explorer vs Netscape of our time).
