How Accurate Is Your Drive Time Data?

Introducing TravelTime’s drive time benchmarking tool

Every location API claims to be accurate. Almost none of them show you the numbers.

We got tired of that. So, we built something new: a public benchmarking tool that scores TravelTime against TomTom, HERE, Mapbox, Valhalla and OSRM, on the same routes, with the same formulas, on one page.

Including the breakdowns where we don’t come first. Stupid? Maybe. Transparent? Definitely.

It’s live now at traveltime.com/accuracy/benchmarks.

Calculating the drive time comparisons

We sampled randomised origin-destination pairs in several regions across the globe and queried each one at three departure times (05:00, 13:00 and 17:00) through six APIs plus Google.

These routes span busy city centres, open rural roads, and everywhere in between. This ensures the routing engines are tested over a wide variety of traffic conditions and road networks.

After filtering out bad map-snaps, restricted-road artefacts, and routes that any provider (Google included) couldn’t return, we were left with a set of clean routes. Every statistic on the page comes from applying the same formulas to this dataset.

We use Google’s predicted travel time as the reference point. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s the closest thing the industry has to a shared ground truth, and it’s the benchmark everyone is implicitly measured against anyway.

What the data shows

The drive time accuracy benchmark currently spans six countries including the US, UK, and Australia, with more of our supported countries being continuously added.

Key takeaways

In the US, our largest dataset, TravelTime is the most accurate provider tested. The headline number is RMSE (root-mean-square error), a measure of the typical difference between a provider’s prediction and Google’s. Lower is better, and on the full US dataset, TravelTime has the lowest error of any provider – less than half the error of the open-source engines.

Across the other regions, we sit in the leading group alongside TomTom and HERE and comfortably ahead of Mapbox, Valhalla and OSRM. TomTom, with its proprietary traffic dataset, is the engine to beat outside the US.

Look past the headline ranking and several things hold up consistently.

In every region we tested, TravelTime comfortably outperforms Mapbox and the open-source engines, Valhalla and OSRM – often by a two-to-three-times margin on error.

TravelTime performs consistently throughout the day due to strong traffic modelling, as well as across different geographies. We’re also among the most even-handed on bias: TravelTime neither systematically over- nor under-quotes, unlike other providers.

Why this matters if you’re building with a routing API

Accuracy isn’t a bragging right for tech companies. If you’re powering marketplace search, logistics, network modelling, field-service dispatch, or recruitment matching, a travel time estimate that’s quietly off can lead to serious problems.

While we’re confident our benchmarking is correct – we’ve called each of the APIs, paid the bills, and run the models – we invite you to run your own too.

Get a free TravelTime API trial key here.

Accuracy is necessary – but it isn’t the whole decision

Here’s the thing a benchmarking tool can’t show you: accuracy is only one axis, and on its own it rarely decides which API a team actually ships with. By the time you’re in production, several other things tend to matter just as much.

Performance at scale

An API response that’s accurate but slow doesn’t help when you’re computing a matrix of thousands of origins against thousands of destinations in real time for a property search, a logistics plan, or large-scale location scoring, for example.

TravelTime is engineered for exactly that kind of workload, where the question isn’t “how fast is one route” but “how fast are a million.” You can see the performance methodology here.

Caching and data rights

This one can rule out providers before accuracy is even on the table. Several of the big location platforms restrict how long you can store or cache their results (and whether you can cache at all). This makes a lot of analytical and batch use cases legally awkward or outright non-viable.

TravelTime grants caching rights, so you can store and reuse results within your own systems. That’s the difference between an API you can build a product on and one you can only ever call live.

Support that answers

Routing integrations are rarely plug-and-play; the edge cases are where projects stall. Direct access to a team that knows the API – rather than a ticket queue – is often what gets an integration over the line on schedule.

TravelTime offers direct access to the people who built and maintain the API at no extra cost.

And then there’s the part that decides most deals at scale:

Pricing that doesn’t punish growth

Per-request pricing means your bill scales linearly with your usage – every new user, every search, every batch job adds cost, and the model that looked cheap in a pilot becomes the line item nobody can defend.

TravelTime’s fixed-price, unlimited-call model breaks that link: your costs are predictable no matter how much you query, which makes heavy global usage commercially viable. For a lot of teams, this is what makes the maths work.

Try it in your own region

Want to test out the API for yourself? TravelTime is available globally, so you can reproduce this comparison wherever you operate.

Get a free API key, run your own routes, and check the accuracy where it matters to you.