Custom Travel Times provides highly granular speed and bottleneck information for roads around the world, broken down by any time of day and day of week from 2008. The Custom Travel Times are calculated by TomTom leveraging the anonymous historical traffic database of more than 5 trillon data points. This level of detail enabled MVA to interrogate the data so as to provide as much analysis as possible within the city bypass study. MVA was required to develop, calibrate, and validate the road traffic assignment model on behalf of a European client. The data requirements for this project included specific travel time data for a particular month and covered a number of specified routes.

'Our extensive historical traffic database allows us to offer consultancies the information they require to analyse road traffic trends based on a range of differing factors, such as specific times and precise locations,' said Charles Cautley, managing director of TomTom Automotive and Licensing. 'As experienced by the MVA Consultancy, TomTom’s historical traffic data is not only highly accurate, but can be sourced in a matter of days and delivers real cost-savings when compared against traditional methods.'

With a need to obtain very specific traffic data in a short timeframe, Andrew Smith, Projects director of MVA Consultancy, explains why they chose TomTom: 'We investigated the use of TomTom Custom Travel Times and were able to quickly determine that the information we required for the model was accessible in a matter of days. The quality of the data available was also a positive because we could pinpoint traffic trends not only by day, but by hour or minute. We realised a significant financial advantage by opting for TomTom, saving 30% in costs, which has led us to investigate the possibility of using TomTom in other projects and countries.'