Predicting vehicle travel time on city streets for trip preplanning and predicting heavy traffic for proactive control of street congestion

Abstract

We investigate if the vehicle travel time after 6 h on a given street can be predicted, provided the hourly vehicle travel time on the street in the last 19 h. Likewise, we examine if the traffic status (i.e., low, mild, or high) after 6 h on a given street can be predicted, provided the hourly traffic status of the street in the last 19 h. To pursue our objectives, we exploited historical hourly traffic data from Google Maps for a main street in the capital city of Jordan, Amman. We employ several machine learning algorithms to construct our predictive models: neural networks, gradient boosting, support vector machines, AdaBoost, and nearest neighbors. Our experimental results confirm our investigations positively, such that our models have an accuracy of around 98–99% in predicting vehicle travel time and traffic status on our study’s street for the target hour (i.e., after 6 h from a specific point in time). Moreover, given our time series traffic data and our constructed predictive models, we inspect the most critical indicators of street traffic status and vehicle travel time after 6 h on our study’s street. However, as we elaborate in the article, our predictive models do not agree on the degree of importance of our data features.