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Traffic4England

Traffic4England provides Traffic Information and Live Radio reports for Motorways and Major A-Roads in England. The system runs on the Google Cloud computing platform and utilizes Google Android mobile phones to deliver traffic information into the hands of the users, wherever they may be.

Organisation of the Application

The Google Android application running on the mobile device is responsible for providing the user with 'near real-time' traffic information. Information is automatically updated every three minutes while the application is active. Users may override this by performing a 'manual refresh', this is normally only necessary when there are very poor mobile network conditions.

Users may decide to enter their locations manually or let the application figure out the location via GPS. The application requires a location to determine the distances to traffic events. Locations outside the United Kingdom will not work with the application. The system is configured to use a default manual location of London, so if you're not in England, you can operate the application normally, while leaving the GPS option switched off.

The Application has three main views.

1. The Main List View containing a list of all current traffic events in the England.
   
2. The Detail View, containing the detail descriptions of items in the event list, accessed by one 'tap' on the list view.
3. The Map View, containing all traffic events plotted on a map, along with current location and traffic speed indicators, where the average road speed is less than 40mph. The Map View is access by a 'Long Tap' (where you hold your finger down for just a bit longer than a normal tap), on a Main List View or anywhere in the Detail View.

Main View

Detail View

Map View

Screen Navigation

Navigation between the three main screens above is performed by either a 'tap', 'long tap' or 'back' button. Using these 3 navigation methods allows you to move easily between the screens. When performing a 'long tap' on a traffic event in the Main List View, the Map View is activated and the zoomed to the traffic event that you long tapped. The 'long tap' in Detail View, zooms to the current traffic event on the Map View.


When on the Main List View, the 'back' button ends the application. Pressing the 'back' button while on the Detail View screen returns you to the Main List View.

Main List View

The Main List View shows all traffic events reported by the UK Highways Agency, across England. The basic organisation of the list enables you to see Road, Event Type, Motorway Junctions, direction of traffic affected and distance from your current location. The list is sorted by distance from current location, with items at the top being nearest to where you are.

The list automatically updates every three minutes when in the foreground. If you switch away and switch back, the program checks every 30 seconds that the three minutes update period hasn't elapsed. There is also a manual refresh button for the impatient. However as the as the back end servers update at 3 minute intervals for the traffic event data, it only makes sense to press the manual refresh button if you're having connectivity problems with a poor network connection. Most of the time you can just let Traffic4England get on with refreshing itself

Traffic Event List Items

Traffic Event List items show particular problems on the roads in England. Each item consists of eight pieces of information. The list is sorted by distance from current location with the nearest first.

Main List Icons

The list of signs for available road conditions is summarised in below. 'Roadworks' and 'Traffic Queues' are generic, while the other icons attempt to give a more detailed description of the event causing the traffic problems. The 'Entry' and 'Exit' slip icons are notable because they typically indicate that the main route is still flowing normally, but that its not possible to join or leave the motorway at a particular junction. By zooming into the particular event on the Map View, its normally possible to see exactly which slip road is closed, the can be especially useful and complicated road junctions.

Detail View

The Detail View contains all the information from the Main List View, with the addition of the date and time that the traffic event was created, and a detailed description of the actual event. Tapping the screen returning you to the Main List View. Long Tapping the screen takes you to the Map View with the current item centered on the screen.

Map View

The Map View presents the information listed in the main view on a map. The current location is shown along will all the traffic events across England. Tapping a traffic event icon brings up a detailed description of the event. The user can zoom in and out of the map.

In addition to traffic events, there is also traffic flow information presented on the map. The traffic flow information shows places on the road network where average traffic speeds are less than 40mph.

Using the Map View, you can investigate what's happening on England's major roads and which areas you should avoid. Here's an example:


The Map View above shows a zoomed out view of Bristol and surrounding area. Looking briefly at the map its clear that there are a few problems here. The coloured circles indicate points on the road where average traffic speed is less than 40mph. The specific colours indicate the following:

• Light Green Circle: 30 - 39 mph
• Yellow Circle: 29-20 mph
• Orange Circle: 19-10 mph
• Red Circle: 9-1 mph, and 0 mph. 

Zooming into the traffic near Bristol, we can more clearly see the direction and speeds of the traffic a various points within the problem area. Each of the coloured traffic flow symbols indicate a specific range of speeds. The labels are 35,25,15,5 and 0. By zooming in further and tapping on a specific traffic flow symbol the following information is revealed:-


The speed is the average speed at the particular point accurate to 1 mph. The flow is the flow rate in terms of cars per hour over the past 5 minutes. So a value of 3096 means that the rate at which cars were passing over the past 5 minutes was equivalent to the rate needed for 3096 cars to pass in an hour. In other words the road is very busy. In rough terms, the flow rate shows how busy the road is at a particular point. All flow symbols will show a speed, but they won't all show a flow rate.

Once we've examined the traffic speeds and flow rate on the M5 near Bristol, there's still the Queuing Icon in the centre of the Map View above which gives us more information.


This information links to the data presented in the Main List View, and accessible via the Detail View. It gives a summary of the general traffic problems in the area and the expected delays until they clear.

If we want more information about the overall traffic conditions in the region, you can listen to Traffic Radio 24 hours a day, which is accessible from the menu on the Main List View.