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I am working the Distance Matrix API to identify travel times between origin and destination coordinates. My question is about how this travel time is calculated. From what I can ascertain from the supporting information, if a start or end time is specified, the travel time will account for anticipated traffic conditions. However, it is unclear what if any traffic impact there is as default, when a start or end time is not passed. When submitting a request for a driving mode matrix specifying just origin and destination locations, how is the travel time calculated? Is the appropriate road speed used, assuming no traffic? Is there an average road speed applied to individual road sections? Will this calculation ever provide a different response?
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However, keep in mind that road speed variations and unexpected events may lead to different responses, making it advisable to account for potential fluctuations in travel time.
If no start or end time is provided in the request, traffic data is not used, and the posted speed limits are generally used.
Thank you for the responses. Having sampled some of the return distance and duration values and compared these to the information provided on the Bing Maps website, I have found that the matrix is not returning the quickest / shortest route; the distance and duration does correlate with one of the route options offered on the website, just not the shortest / quickest. Is there any reason why this would be happening and whether there is a way to control this?
There are a lot of possible reason given all the different options available for customizing route calculations. I suspect the distance matrix service does a few more optimizations given the number of calculations it needs to do. In general, shortest path calculations are approximations as calculating the absolute shortest path over a road network would take years. A heuristic algorithm is usually used, and these get pretty close to the shortest path most of the time, however the result may vary slightly. When using the route API directly, if you have one route returned it may not align with the consumer website, but if you ask for 3 or more, you will likely get one that is shorter than the original single route (the route response will likely reorder these so the shortest is first). That said, the consumer website uses real time and predictive traffic data, and it is possible for the average traffic flow to be faster than the posted speed limit (not unusual for highway traffic to be 5 mph above the posted speed limit).
Hi @Dan Cull Greetings! I am following up to see if you have any additional questions or need further assistance.
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