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What drive time speed is used for each road?

Real Speeds including MapMechanics ITIS GPS speeds

To calculate journey times, create drive time catchments and optimise routes, most systems use road networks with speeds attached to each street segment.

The speeds can be determined in a number of ways:

Road Classification

The simplest approach is to assign speeds to roads based on the road classification, so A roads are faster than B roads etc.

However, this takes no account of the congestion in town centres. MapMechanics data sets also provide urban/rural splits so that the speed of A roads in conurbations are lower than those of other A roads.

For large catchments strategic network such as AA road data provides good results. However, for smaller isochrones a more detailed street network such as NAVTEQ streets is better.

See the difference>>>

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Image comparing distance that can be travelled using different speed data

Real GPS Speeds

Although the road classification method can provide good results over a distance, when detailed results are important, road speeds from real vehicles on the move generate superior results. For example A roads traveling out of the city centre are faster than those traveling into town. See the difference>>>

MapMechanics have processed billions of ITIS GPS signals from real vehicles on the move in Great Britain.

MapMechanics separates the data by vehicle type and time of day to create a range of data sets with rush-hour, off-peak and night time speeds for private vehicles and commercial trucks.

Unique StopZone Approach

StopZone is unique to TruckStops software. With TruckStops you can use road networks with any of the speed methods described on this page, or you can use the Stops Zone method. Both have proved very successful and reliable.

StopZone works on the basis that it is slower to travel through congested areas than uncongested ones and uses a sophisticated algorithm to adapt the crow fly distance to a more realistic value and then adjust more carefully around the start and end points of the journey based on the relative congestion that you are likely to encounter there. Fast and easy to keep up to date. This method is used by many TruckStops users all over the world.

Products

Streets: Traffic Vol. & Speeds

These data sets provide average speed & traffic volume by time of day for each vector street link, created from ITIS billions of GPS signals. Use the volume data to estimate passing trade and the speed data to calculate realistic routing times and to accurately generate drive time catchments & matrices.
Streets Traffic Vol. & Speeds >>>

Roads: Traffic Vol. & Speeds
Calculate journey times using speeds attached to a range of different road data sets from the AA, Navteq and OS, for example.
Roads Traffic Vol. & Speeds >>>

Your own experience

With GeoConcept mapping you can alter the speed on any road if you wish. This approach enables those in rural areas to set speeds to zero when a road is impassable due to bad weather, for example. The method can also include adding new roads to model potential by passes etc (perhaps added at time of opening a new store).

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With TruckStops vehicle routing and scheduling, you can also update times and distances from on-board devices/tracking data sampled over a period of time, or put in any pre-agreed times and distances for stem journeys and travel between calls.