How does Google Maps work out journey times? One further thing to note is I excluded from the results any trip that had an unpredictable incident such as a car crash, although there was only one such incident over my trips. However the accuracy does not fall by a significant amount and my confidence in Google’s journey accuracy stays high even when undertaking long trips in traffic. This is expected as those two variables make predicting journey times much harder. One thing to note is that the journey time accuracy went down based on the amount of traffic on the route and the distance travelled. It also gives me a lot of confidence that the technology we are offering to our customers is the best and most accurate there is. This gives me a lot of confidence about the accuracy of Google Maps journey times. The majority of my trips were in green or orange, but I did have some with red traffic for comparison.Ĭonsidering the number of journeys I undertook and their average time and distance, I think an average of 1.8 min out of predicted journey time is a very good result. I also recorded the traffic conditions based on the Google Maps navigation app and if the whole route equaled green, orange or red traffic. I spent an average amount of each journey on motorways, A and B roads, with the odd country lane thrown in for good measure. The trips were mainly from my house in Hampshire to locations in the South of England. I conducted 56 individual trips with an average distance of 18 miles and journey time of 32 minutes. to make sure the results were as representative as possible. I tried my best to stick to good driving behaviour, speed limit etc. To undertake the analysis, I would enter my route into Google Maps, note down the predicted journey and arrival times and compare these to the actual times. Google Maps journey time analysis and findings Having completed the analysis, I can confirm that, as expected, the Google Maps journey times are very accurate. Over the past two months, I have noted the predicted journey time at the start of any car trip and measured this against the actual time. This is exactly what I have been doing over the last couple of months. However, I had not validated the accuracy of the journey times. I would quite often let the person at the other end of my journey know my ETA and - bingo - arrive at that exact time. Having used Google Maps for my own in-car navigation for a few years, I believe the predicted journey times are indeed very accurate. Google does not provide much documentation on the actual accuracy of their journey times, so it often comes down to the potential user to test this for themselves. Testing the accuracy of Google Maps journey times So, I decided to put Google Maps to the test to find out just how reliable it is. One question that always comes up is how accurate the journey times are. I have been doing quite a bit of work with businesses and government organisations on how to use Google Maps in real time and in particular the predictive Journey times and Estimated time of Arrival (ETA) functionality available through the Google Maps APIs.
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