Raise the Hammer

More Tomtom crap! If there is one thing traffic engineers and urban planners the continent over agree on (the ones not being paid by Tomtom), using these Tomtom studies as a measure for anything accurate other than the sale of Tomtom units, is mostly useless. Their studies might be useful if your are using it with other collected data, inside an isolated area or series of areas inside a city. But if you look at their very flawed study methodology, a methodology that most first and second year students studying these subjects at university can easily spot as a problem, it is a piss poor way to compare anything as complex as traffic levels between large city wide metropolitan regions. All while trying to break all this complexity down to a simple string of numbers, and have the data actually mean anything. This is why the media (bloggers included) love it and continue to use it, its simple. Is it actually accurate in anyway? Especially when comparing whole regions, no! The reason is why a study like this is rarely done is that, for any kind of study like this to be really accurate, it would be expensive, incredibly complex, very time consuming (it would take years to just set down all the measures of what you want) and would not lend it self to simple string of numbers when it was done.

There are literally hundreds of different measures involved and how each traffic network link functions (its network role) in each of the cities being chosen to be measured. Assuming you can breakdown all the traffic data from all these cities exactly the same way. Texas has something like this for just its state highways and expressways and boy its involved, complex and is not for anyone interested in a easy quick read. It's methodology is really a ever growing complex system and is has to be done by a large research team at several Texas universities, as group project. If you if you want a copy of their latest information its available, but not for free!