Revealing the day-to-day regularity of urban congestion patterns with 3D speed maps

In this paper, we investigate the day-to-day regularity of urban congestion patterns. We first partition link speed data every 10 min into 3D clusters that propose a parsimonious sketch of the congestion pulse. We then gather days with similar patterns and use consensus clustering methods to produce a unique global pattern that fits multiple days, uncovering the day-to-day regularity. We show that the network of Amsterdam over 35 days can be synthesized into only 4 consensual 3D speed maps with 9 clusters. This paves the way for a cutting-edge systematic method for travel time predictions in cities. By matching the current observation to historical consensual 3D speed maps, we design an efficient real-time method that successfully predicts 84% trips travel times with an error margin below 25%. The new concept of consensual 3D speed maps allows us to extract the essence out of large amounts of link speed observations and as a result reveals a global and previously mostly hidden picture of traffic dynamics at the whole city scale, which may be more regular and predictable than expected.