5 Questions to Ask Your Traffic Data Provider
Every traffic intelligence vendor will tell you they offer city-wide coverage and real-time insights. Before a public sector team commits budget and years of institutional trust to a provider, here are five questions worth asking directly, and how TraceMark™ Flow answers each one.
1. Where does your underlying data actually come from?
Some platforms are built on proprietary sensor networks that only cover the roads they've physically instrumented. Others are dashboards built over third-party data feeds they don't control. Ask specifically: is this built on a global, continuously updated road information source, or on infrastructure that has to be expanded corridor by corridor?
This single answer determines whether "city-wide view" is accurate. TraceMark™ Flow is built on Google Roads Management Insights, drawing on Google's global road data coverage, which isn't limited to where hardware has been installed.
2. Can you show me this working in a city, live?
Case studies can demonstrate what a technology is capable of, but seeing it applied to your own network provides a much clearer picture of its practical value. Can you put your own roads on screen and see current congestion, journey times and reliability data in action? TraceMark™ Flow is designed to do exactly that. Transport teams can define their own routes and view live and historical performance against their network, making it easier to understand how the technology could support real-world planning and decision-making.
3. Does this integrate with the systems we already run?
Traffic intelligence that lives on its own, disconnected from your operations centre, your reporting stack, or your scheduling systems, will be capped on the value it can deliver. Ask whether the platform offers a genuine data access API, not just a dashboard, and whether it's built on infrastructure your technical team can actually connect to. TraceMark™ Flow's API is built on Google Cloud specifically so traffic intelligence can be embedded into the systems your teams already rely on.
4. What's your track record?
Vendor reliability is one of the major risks in public sector procurement. A shiny product with a two-year-old company behind it is a very different bet than a platform backed by an organisation with decades of delivery history in geospatial and government data integration. Ask about the company's history, not just the product's feature list, and ask who else has trusted them with multi-year deployments. TraceMark™ Flow is built by NGIS, a Google Premier partner with 30 years of geospatial delivery experience, already operational with authorities across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific.
5. How do you help us prove this is working?
The hardest part of any transport intervention often isn't making the change; it's providing the result. Ask whether the platform gives you built-in reporting that measures journey resilience and reliability before and after a policy change. TraceMark™ Flow's Reports view is built specifically for this: flexible reporting and analytics designed to track impact over time, not just describe current conditions.
Why This List Exists
These questions are about the operational reality of running a platform for years, not months: whether the coverage is real, whether it plugs into what you already have, whether the vendor will still be engaging with you, and whether you'll be able to deliver return on your investment.