How Google Maps helps developers to predict travel time using a new API?

Author: Jose
January 15, 2016
How Google Maps helps developers to predict travel time using a new API?

Overview

Google, a plethora of technologies, is really inventing some future-driven outputs that truly happen to make every internet user’s life better. The recent buzz from center is the debut of a new Google Maps API providing access to Maps’ trusted predictive journey times. Now developers can scroll over the eyes to build a predictive travel time information in their apps.

How it works

Here Google Maps uses the traffic data over a particular period. That is the system stores the traffic details of every particular day, hour, or minute of different routes or locations and helps itself to predict which is the quickest accessible route to the destination. For instance, if you want to go from city ‘A’ to city ‘B’ at 4 pm on a Wednesday, the first thing you need to do is set the current location and destination. Traffic conditions vary from day to day. It is not the same surrounding of Sunday that you might experience on a Wednesday. The same applies to the hours as well. So, when you check the Maps after setting the destination, it shows you the easiest route, scrapping information from historical and live data secondering the other routes that might be good options for the other days.

This new update benefits many developers who integrate Google Maps in their apps and web interfaces enabling a great experience to their clients. It excels in using both live and predicted traffic information, so that one could plan hours, days, or even weeks prior to the journey time. The Standard Plan benefits to get the traffic features in the available Directions and Distance Matrix APIs and allows up to 2500 requests per day at no cost.

The all new updated API also integrates more waypoints which are now 23 from 8. Unfortunately, the number of waypoints and traffic features remain limited in the JavaScript Maps API to Google Maps for professional customers as of now. So hear developing geeks, to start with the new traffic features, add the departure time parameter to Directions API or Distance Matrix API queries. The traffic conditions will be analyzed and predicted based on the given data of the upcoming journey.

Check out the video below for better view.

Read The Google Maps Directions API for more details.