An Open Source Tool to Extract Traffic Data from Google Maps: Limitations and Challenges

Abstract

Road traffic modelling, analysis, and prediction require accurate and preprocessed spatiotemporal traffic data including measurements like traffic speed and count. Many existing and emerging surveillance systems are currently used to facilitate traffic data collection. Google Maps is a web mapping service that leverages GPS crowdsourcing to retrieve accurate traffic data verified by both the research community and industry. Google Maps facilitates APIs to provide access to this data with a paid subscription. Google Maps also make this traffic data publicly available through their web interface, but with limited features and requires further pre-processing. All existing tools to facilitate these publicly available traffic data through the Google Maps web interface is either lack essential functionalities or are proprietary. We have developed an open-source web-based data scraper tool to extract and export available traffic data from the Google Maps web interface in multiple usable formats. The tool provides a user-friendly interface that enables users to visually mark the locations of interests and to flexibly determine the required periods for data collections. Performance evaluation shows that the tool can retrieve traffic data from Google Maps in a linear time complexity with no significant computational overhead. Limitations and challenges to develop such tools are also investigated.