Unlock business insights with traffic data and spatial analysis

Spatial analysis is a process where challenges are modeled geographically. These challenges might include evaluating the geographic suitability of locations for site selection, financial investment or transportation infrastructure upgrades. Results of this analysis are computer processed, allowing us to explore the world in a new way. Every business and government body relies on understanding location, so having the best knowledge possible about places is incredibly valuable. From parcel delivery to on-demand food distribution to safe and efficient road travel, knowing the location of origin, destination, and all points in between is crucial.

Spatial analysis has traditionally been considered too complex for general use, meaning it’s largely been disconnected from the business world. But now, with advances in data science, spatial analysis is more accessible, and so companies are becoming more data-driven and spatially aware than ever.

This type of analysis is now supporting a whole variety of use cases in real estate, financial services, telecoms and governments.

• Route optimization: Spatially optimizing driver routes allows organizations to improve customer experience and increase revenue in parcel delivery.

• Fleet management: Using location intelligence in the fleet management process allows companies to improve efficiency, reduce costs and comply with regulations (i.e., avoid travel on restricted roads).

• Supply chain optimization: Location intelligence helps to find better ways to serve stores and identify the optimal location for new distribution centers.

• Ghost kitchens: Spatial data insights can suggest where to open a ghost kitchen, maximizing availability to those who want to rent the kitchen.

• Outdoor advertising: Help predict and measure potential ad exposure for billboards.

• Road safety: Analysts can identify accident hotspots and work with departments of transportation to improve road safety.

While spatial data is incredibly powerful, it takes expertise to bring analysis to life. Companies like TomTom provide the location data, while companies like CARTO supply the engine that analyzes and produces results. CARTO is a location intelligence platform provider, that specializes in allowing customers to store, enrich, analyze, and visualize their data to make spatially aware decisions. Its goal is to spatially enable every data scientist – making them more productive and impactful within their respective companies.

Location intelligence leads the way

CARTO’s cloud native location intelligence platform enables thousands of users to take advantage of the power of spatial analysis.

In road safety, CARTO’s clients develop traffic management models, which has led to the discovery of traffic bottlenecks. This model uses TomTom traffic data to help visualize road speeds, analyze travel times and assess the impact of traffic density by day of week and time of day.

Fleet management customers use the CARTO platform and TomTom routing data to identify more efficient routes, specific to large trucks and vans. The resulting analysis provides organizations with views of mobility patterns, speed, travel time and road network performance – factors that are critical to streamline asset management.

To help drive supply chain optimization, the CARTO platform and TomTom historical traffic data identify the optimal location for new distribution centers. Factors such as traffic density and drive time analysis from the proposed distribution center to client locations are analyzed, ensuring the distribution center’s location is optimized. Other considerations are analyzing routes at certain times of the day to help fleets avoid traffic and high toll prices using advanced truck routing.

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We've had a very positive experience using TomTom's data and technology. They have become CARTO's go-to geocoding provider and using their traffic and speed datasets, our clients have been able to build road traffic applications and improve traffic management, discover traffic bottlenecks, visualize road speeds, analyze travel times and traffic density, and get insights about mobility pain points. TomTom's robust and high-quality data has become an invaluable resource to many of CARTO's clients.

Javier Pérez Trufero

VP of Product at CARTO