TravelTime Drive Time Comparisons tool

This tool compares the travel times obtained from TravelTime Routes API, Google Maps Directions API, TomTom Routing API, and Mapbox Directions API. Source code is available on GitHub.

Features

• Get travel times from TravelTime API, Google Maps API, TomTom API and Mapbox API in parallel, for provided origin/destination pairs and a set of departure times.
• Analyze the differences between the results and print out an accuracy comparison against Google, also general cross-comparison results.

Prerequisites

The tool requires Python 3.11+ installed on your system. You can download it from here.

Installation

Create a new virtual environment with a chosen name (here, we'll name it 'env'):

python -m venv env

Activate the virtual environment:

source env/bin/activate

Install the project and its dependencies:

pip install traveltime-drive-time-comparisons

Setup

Provide credentials and desired max requests per minute for the APIs inside the config.json file. Optionally, you can set a custom endpoint for each provider. You can also disable unwanted APIs by changing the enabled value to false.

{
  "traveltime": {
    "app-id": "<your-app-id>",
    "api-key": "<your-api-key>",
    "max-rpm": "60"
  },
  "api-providers": [
    {
      "name": "google",
      "enabled": true,
      "api-key": "<your-api-key>",
      "max-rpm": "60",
      "api-endpoint": "custom-endpoint.com"
    },
    ...other providers
  ]
}

Usage

Interactive mode (recommended)

Run the interactive wizard which guides you through all required settings step by step:

traveltime_drive_time_comparisons --interactive

CLI mode

Run the tool directly with command-line arguments:

traveltime_drive_time_comparisons --input [Input CSV file path] --output [Output CSV file path] \
    --date [Date (YYYY-MM-DD)] --departure-times [Departure times (HH:MM, HH:MM)]

Required arguments:

• --input [Input CSV file path]: Path to the input file. Input file is required to have a header row and at least one row with data, with two columns: origin and destination. The values in the columns must be latitude and longitude pairs, separated by comma and enclosed in double quotes. For example: "51.5074,-0.1278". Columns must be separated by comma as well. Check out the project's repository for examples in the examples directory and more pre-prepared routes in the inputs directory.
• --output [Output CSV file path]: Path to the output file. It will contain the gathered travel times. See the details in the Output section
• --date [Date (YYYY-MM-DD)]: date on which the travel times are gathered. Use a future date, as Google API returns errors for past dates (and times). Take into account the time needed to collect the data for provided input.
• --departure-times [Departure times (HH:MM)]: All departure times in HH:MM format, separated by comma ",", spaces can be used.

Optional arguments:

• --time-zone-id [Time zone ID]: non-abbreviated time zone identifier in which the departure times are specified, for every route. For example: Europe/London. For more information, see here. If omitted, each route departs at its origin's local time, which suits inputs spanning several time zones.
• --config [Config file path]: Path to the config file. Default - ./config.json
• --accuracy-output [Output CSV file path]: Path to the output file for the accuracy table. If not defined, the table will only be printed to the console.
• --skip-data-gathering: If set, reads already gathered data from input file and skips data gathering. Input file must conform to the output file format.
• --skip-plotting: If set, graphs of the final summary will not be shown.

Example:

traveltime_drive_time_comparisons --input examples/uk.csv --output output.csv --date 2023-09-20 \
    --departure-times "07:00, 10:00, 13:00, 16:00, 19:00" --time-zone-id "Europe/London"

Console output

The console output contains results when comparing each provider to Google (this part of course relies on Google provider being enabled in the configuration file).

• Accuracy Score - 100 - mean_absolute_error. This gives a score 0 to 100 of how close the travel times on average are to Google, regardless of whether they are higher or lower.
• Relative Time - 100 - bias (bias can be negative). This gives a value around 100 (can be higher or lower than 100), which indicates how much on average this provider undershoots or overshoots when compared to Google.

Examples:

• Accuracy Score = 95, Relative Time = 105 - this provider always returns higher results than Google, by 5% on average.
• Accuracy Score = 95, Relative Time = 95 - this provider always returns lower results than Google, by 5% on average.
• Accuracy Score = 95, Relative Time = 102 - this provider usually (but not always), returns higher results than Google. It's off by 5% on average, but bias is only +2%.

2025-07-17 11:27:45 | INFO | Baseline summary, comparing to Google: 
     Provider  Accuracy Score  Relative Time
0      Google          100.00         100.00
1  TravelTime           77.62         110.65
2      TomTom           71.24         123.93
3      Mapbox           57.00         135.66

It also contains more detailed comparisons with each API

2025-06-11 13:23:36 | INFO | Comparing TravelTime to other providers:
2025-06-11 13:23:36 | INFO | 	Mean relative error compared to Google API: 12.91%
2025-06-11 13:23:36 | INFO | 	90% of TravelTime results differ from Google API by less than 32%
2025-06-11 13:23:36 | INFO | 	Mean relative error compared to TomTom API: 26.50%
2025-06-11 13:23:36 | INFO | 	90% of TravelTime results differ from TomTom API by less than 48%
2025-06-11 13:23:36 | INFO | Comparing Google to other providers:
2025-06-11 13:23:36 | INFO | 	Mean relative error compared to TravelTime API: 17.11%
2025-06-11 13:23:36 | INFO | 	90% of Google results differ from TravelTime API by less than 48%
2025-06-11 13:23:36 | INFO | 	Mean relative error compared to TomTom API: 33.21%
2025-06-11 13:23:36 | INFO | 	90% of Google results differ from TomTom API by less than 40%
2025-06-11 13:23:36 | INFO | Comparing TomTom to other providers:
2025-06-11 13:23:36 | INFO | 	Mean relative error compared to TravelTime API: 19.58%
2025-06-11 13:23:36 | INFO | 	90% of TomTom results differ from TravelTime API by less than 32%
2025-06-11 13:23:36 | INFO | 	Mean relative error compared to Google API: 24.60%
2025-06-11 13:23:36 | INFO | 	90% of TomTom results differ from Google API by less than 29%

File output

The output file will contain the origin and destination columns from input file, with some additional columns:

• departure_time: departure time in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS±HHMM format. It includes date, time and timezone offset.
• *_travel_time: travel time gathered from alternative provider API in seconds
• tt_travel_time: travel time gathered from TravelTime API in seconds
• error_percentage_*: relative error between provider and TravelTime travel times in percent, relative to provider result.

Sample output with 3 providers - TravelTime, Google and TomTom

origin,destination,departure_time,tt_travel_time,google_travel_time,tomtom_travel_time,error_percentage_traveltime_to_google,error_percentage_traveltime_to_tomtom,error_percentage_google_to_traveltime,error_percentage_google_to_tomtom,error_percentage_tomtom_to_traveltime,error_percentage_tomtom_to_google
"33.05187660000014 , -117.1350031999999","33.14408130000009 , -117.02942509999977",2025-06-20 13:00:00-0700,1970.0,2224.0,1869.0,11,5,12,18,5,15
"33.05187660000014 , -117.1350031999999","33.14408130000009 , -117.02942509999977",2025-06-20 16:00:00-0700,2052.0,3042.0,2274.0,32,9,48,33,10,25
"37.36713689999986 , -122.09885940000017","37.35365440000001 , -122.21751989999996",2025-06-20 13:00:00-0700,1868.0,1832.0,1317.0,1,41,1,39,29,28
"37.36713689999986 , -122.09885940000017","37.35365440000001 , -122.21751989999996",2025-06-20 16:00:00-0700,2004.0,1896.0,1345.0,5,48,5,40,32,29

License

This project is licensed under MIT License. For more details, see the LICENSE file.