Using the Realtime Trajectory tool

What You’ll Learn

The Realtime Trajectory tool visualises how long it takes for vehicles to traverse a path, and where they stop in real-time for any long arterial road.

Getting Realtime Trajectory ready

• Selecting a path: Click once for the origin point, and click again for your destination point.

For the best results, make your path selections longer.

• Editing your selections: Once you’ve selected a path, you can edit them by changing the name or colour of the path/icon.
• If you’ve turned on Advanced View, you can also upload WKT files.

There is no date selection in Realtime Trajectory but you will be able to see historical data 7 days before the current date (i.e. today).

Start Trajectory Stream

When you’re done with selecting a path selection you can start the realtime stream. Just keep in mind for some selections you may only see a few lines as a small subset of our providers have high point frequency to accurately reflect real-time trajectories.

The Results panel

• Top section:
  • Control Data shows you the date that is one week prior to the current/real-time date establishing the Control Data range. This is not customisable.
  • Streams: This is your selection which is currently streaming real-time trajectory data, and plotting it against historical data. Note, that this tool only supports one path selection at a time.
  • Posted Speed Limit: By default, the platform selects the posted speed limit as 100km/h. You can toggle this based and select the posted speed limit.
• Graph features:
  • Dotted lines represent vehicle trajectory the week before. This is used to compare network performance with current trajectories.
  • Solid lines show real-time trajectories and will load as the vertical, black line moves along. The black line represents the current time.
    • Green represents free flow speed, while orange and red represent slower speeds, which could indicate congestion. This will depend on the speed limit you set for the path.
  • When you hover on the graph, you’ll see a little car in the map move along your chosen path.

We recommend using light mode for better visual clarity when interpreting real-time trajectory lines.

Further Links

• How to select a path, zone, or boundary
• Understanding Real-Time Trajectory
• Understanding Results from Compass

0:01

The Realtime Trajectory tool allows you to view trajectory data in real-time. Similar to the Path Analysis tool, to select a path, you would click once to select your origin and then double click to select your destination. The Realtime trajectory tool works really well on really long path selections which allows you to select a very long pathway, like a motorway or a highway.

0:24

One of the most common questions we get is about the Date Selection. Under Realtime Trajectory, you're not allowed to change the date, and you might be thinking, but if it's real-time why is the date showing me 7 days in the past? This date is used as a reference point for historical data. So, you'll notice when you open the Results panel in the Realtime Trajectory tool, that you have dotted lines and solid lines. The dotted lines are representative of historical data of 7 days in the past. As those real-time lines load in, they'll appear as solid-coloured lines. You'll also notice that there is a vertical solid black line. This is representative of the current time.

1:05

If you hover your mouse over the trajectory graph, you'll notice that the car on the left-hand side of the map will also move. This gives you an indication, very similar to our G-force and Speed Over Distance graphs in Path Analysis, where along that path that data is corresponding to.

We've sped this up just a little bit, so you get an idea of the trajectories as they load into the graph. Each line represents one vehicle trajectory.

1:29

We also have the posted speed limit at the top right-hand corner. This allows you to change the speed relative to what the speed limit is along the path that you have selected.