Telraam distinguishes between observed, typical and relative traffic data. Let’s discover what these terms mean in practice.
Observed
The observed traffic is the total traffic observed by an individual Telraam on the network, e.g. your Telraam, for a given hour. This observed data is reported on the Dashboard, under the label “Data”.
Example: The total number of cars that passed your street segment last Friday between 2:00 PM and 3:00 PM is 1100. This number of 1100 cars is an example of observed traffic data.
Typical
Typical traffic data is essentially the average of the observed traffic data over the past year during the same hour and day of the week. The typical traffic data is used in the ranking process. Please note that in the case of a Telraam that has been active for less than a year, typical traffic data merely spans the period since the Telraam was activated.
Example: Building on the previous fictitious example, typical traffic would be the average of the total observed traffic of the last 52 Fridays between 2:00 PM and 3:00 PM. Let’s assume this street segment typically sees 1000 cars during that hour.
Relative
The observed traffic can also be expressed as a percentage of the typical traffic. This percentage is known as the relative traffic data.
Example: Continuing our previous example (observed traffic of 1100 cars, typical traffic of 1000 cars), the relative traffic last Friday was 110%. All in all, 10% more cars were counted last Friday than expected based on a year’s worth of counts for this hour on this day of the week.
How does a growing Telraam network impact these data types?
Because even well-designed Telraam networks are not always guaranteed to have the same set of sensors active (as new cameras may be added over time, some cameras may become temporarily inactive or be moved to other segments, etc.), Telraam ensures that when calculating typical and relative traffic data for a given hour, it only uses the observed and historical data from those segments of the network that actually had active counts during the hour in question.