Online Traffic Data (UK)

**stevieg** · 04-25-2004, 12:56 PM

(EDITED)
Was originally about route 66 tmc data from the web, now mainly looking at TPEG info used by BBC, UK highways agency and others for free; this may be available in Europe and others too.

I'm looking at making an easy way of making this data available in a processed format for use in VOICES and perhaps others.

So far UK data can be downloaded from http://www.stevieg.org/traffic as a CSV file and imported straight into MapPoint; this data is processed on demand from the BBC travel website into a suitable format

**chunkymonkey909** · 04-25-2004, 04:09 PM

This looks very interesting.
The tie up between traffic data and GPS is long overdue.
We just need someone to write some software to download this data and integrate it into a GPS app!

**SilentAdmirer** · 04-25-2004, 11:10 PM

Looks very useful. Lets see if I can use it in VOICES

Don't think its lat/lon take a look at this
cause http://rs0124.66.com:8080/tmc?time=0&l=ENG&m=deu8&u=1

ThanX
Satish

**SilentAdmirer** · 04-25-2004, 11:29 PM

For UK it looks like lat/lon but for Germany either I got the address wrong or there is something else

**stevieg** · 04-26-2004, 08:18 AM

Found some more, for the UK at least:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/travelnews/xml/tpegml_en/rtm.xml

BBC Travel News in XML format

**Enforcer** · 04-26-2004, 08:29 AM

What we really need is to be able to access the trafficmaster data.

I did email them about getting a device to connect to a PC/Laptop, but said they had no intentions of doing anything yet.

**elmo_eats_rust** · 04-26-2004, 08:36 AM

Minnesota has similiar traffic data: http://www.dot.state.mn.us/tmc/traff...ata/index.html

**tekta** · 04-26-2004, 09:37 AM

I think it is TMC format, that has codes for different types of incident which can then be translated into each country's native language.

I assume in route 66 this data is shown by highlighting each road? If so perhaps some of the data relates to individual roads, not co-ordinates, and perhaps the junctions/distance along them. Gonna be a bit tricky to import into other GPS programs?

**stevieg** · 04-27-2004, 03:22 AM

Yes in route 66, it highlights the position of the problem on the relevant road. I've written a script ( http://supra.aston.ac.uk/tmc.php ) quickly that sort of converts it into mappoint / autoroute compatible CSV file and it gets it in the right place for most of them.

The UK government also has a website which supplies the BBC and others which shares information; their website is at http://www.tih.org.uk/TIH/Index.do

I am going to have a look at parsing the XML file from the BBC website though first rather than the route 66 because in theory, everyone with a TV licence in the UK has pre-paid to use the data from the BBC website so they are less likely to moan!