Travel Times, Congestion Levels, and Delays at Intersections Calculated on the Basis of Floating Car Data

Traditionally, the mapping of flow rate in a road network has been based on spot and intersection counting. Using these counting techniques, detailed information about traffic at a few well-picked spots in the road network is obtained. However, these techniques give no exact information about traffic only a few meters away from the measuring spots. The situation is totally the opposite when it comes to log data from GPS receivers in cars. Here detailed information about individual cars in the entire road network is obtained. However, the GPS data is only available from a small subset of the cars. This paper presents a method to determine travel time, congestion levels and delays using GPS data from moving vehicles – the so-called floating car data.