Question

Can FME help to export traffic layer of Google map?

  • 7 October 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 6 views

i want to create a tool that digest real time traffic layer from Google map. So is there anyway legally that FME can export this layer into raster or shp file to be used in my tool? Thank you


2 replies

Userlevel 5
Badge +25

Legally? Most likely not. And knowing Google they've also locked it down technically.

I found something similar in this thread:

https://community.safe.com/s/question/0D54Q000080hUrgSAE/extract-google-traffic-layer

But really curious about the reply of geosander: Basically used an HTML page with custom CSS styling for the Google Traffic Layer and background map, so I would get a "high-contrast" traffic map without too much background noise. I ran this HTML page on localhost and then wrote a script (outside FME) that would render this page at a certain pixel size. The resulting image basically was like a map tile. You needed to specify the latlon bounds and level of detail for the script and it would generate all map tiles for that area within a couple of minutes. The tiles were processed in FME and the traffic congestion values (green - orange - red etc.) were assigned to actual vector road segments along with a timestamp. Along with some average hourly traffic intensity data we had, we could give a rough estimate of the amount of cars that were actually passing by on a road segment at a certain time.

But im a newbie so it would be great if anyone can explain these in more detailed level.

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