Live Traffic is Expensive

The Monopoly of Data

Every time you look on your smartphone for the traffic on a route, that live traffic data came from one of only a small handful of companies. All this data relies on someone somewhere recording the speed of travel along that particular piece of road.

For something like google maps, it comes from users of the same app navigating around city. Actually, something that surprised me was that even if you aren't using navigation, your android phone could be sending this data anyways.

Digital Data is Supposed to be Cheap

Think about all the various apps and services you might use in a given day. You might have the weather shown automatically on your phone's home screen. That data came from some weather service somewhere.

There might be a notification from an app letting you know someone just sent you a new message.

Even the time itself comes from your phone pinging a time server so it is always up to date, even if you cross a time zone.

For the most part, examples above costs almost nothing for the holders of that data, who also charge nothing. Many are actually free, and people and companies offer them up for all to use since they are so simple yet critical for the functioning of the internet. This is how time servers work for example. Click here to see one in action.

If you wanted to make your own app that showed weather, you could choose from a myriad of weather providers and wouldn't have to pay a dime.

I honestly assumed that traffic data was the same way and that making a quick widget would be a walk in the park.

Way More Expensive

Traffic data needs to be actually harvested by actual vehicles driving in the real world. You and I might take part in it as a byproduct of using GPS navigation. But physically getting GPS data, sending it back to somewhere to store it is incredibly hard. I couldn't just decide to do it tomorrow if I wanted to. I'd have to convince a bunch of people all over the world to start using a tracking device that reported back to me. Something that's literally impossible.

Those who already convinced us to willingly participate as sensors around the world know that they have something really valuable and pretty hard to replicate. On top of that, live traffic data is only good as long as it's fresh. So these companies have to store vast amounts of data.

All of this leads to the price of live traffic being WAY and above the price of common services on the internet.

What This Means for RutaRoo

Knowing how expensive the traffic data can be, it kind of creates a challenge. Instead of a widget or dashboard that's up to date to the minute like I had imagined in the beginning, in order to make it a service that didn't break the bank, I had to design around the cost.