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I am a researcher working on traffic flow prediction. For my project I would need to obtain historical traffic flow raw data. Google Maps has a traffic flow overlay which is pretty much the kind of data I need. However, Google doesn't seem to provide access to historical data. There are several other companies that provide analytics based on traffic data to their clients but raw data is never provided. How would one go about obtaining this kind of data?

Edit: the kind of data I need would be spatio-temporal. Take a bunch of N sensor locations on an inner city road network and give me the driving speed of the cars passing through each one of them at T equally spaced time points during a day. So we would have N*T data points per day. The denser the locations the better. If you look at Google Maps traffic overlay you can see traffic flow speeds for almost every small street. I think they take this data from GPS in driving cars as well as stationary sensors. Google doesn't provide historic data but maybe one could record this from the website directly?

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  • $\begingroup$ I can't think of an easy way, but you might try contacting the traffic control department of various cities. Some of them may share this data: cabq.gov/abq-data However, I'm not sure that even that site has exactly what you need. $\endgroup$
    – user4710
    Commented Mar 28, 2016 at 19:43
  • $\begingroup$ Can you describe more precisely, the data that you seek? For example, what would you want the fields to be and for what locations? $\endgroup$
    – Nitesh
    Commented Mar 28, 2016 at 20:47
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    $\begingroup$ I vote to migrate this to the open data StackExchange: opendata.stackexchange.com $\endgroup$
    – Kyle.
    Commented Mar 28, 2016 at 21:29
  • $\begingroup$ Have you tried writing to Google to ask if they have a record they would be willing to give you? $\endgroup$
    – MissMonicaE
    Commented Sep 28, 2016 at 19:19

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You should try contacting cities about getting the sensor data from their Traffic Controller Systems. These usually have several detectors per lane at intersections (they also control the traffic lights so you get data on those as well). Some of these data are property of the companies that supplies these system, in which case you'll need to contact the company. These companies are generally not keen on sharing the data with commercial parties, but generally are interested in sharing it with educational parties as outreach.

I know one public dataset of this kind of data, the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands provides a sample of traffic density data. Unfortunately the metadata is mostly in Dutch.

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There are a lot of companies, both startups and fortune 500 (such as siemens and GE), working on "smart traffic lights". It might be worth trying to hunt down where they get their data from.

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