Why Traditional Traffic APIs Slow Down Development

You've been tasked with adding real-time traffic data to your routing application. You evaluate TomTom and HERE—the industry incumbents—and estimate a two-week integration. Three months later, you're still debugging edge cases in their XML parsers.

This isn't a failure of your engineering team. It's the predictable result of integrating with traffic APIs designed in a different era, for different use cases, with little consideration for developer experience.

The Proprietary Format Problem

TomTom and HERE don't just deliver traffic data—they deliver it in proprietary formats that require custom parsing logic for each provider.

A "minor incident" in TomTom might map to a "moderate slowdown" in HERE. A "lane closure" could be represented completely differently. Your code needs to handle every variation.

The Schema Complexity Tax

Let's look at what happens when you try to extract a simple piece of information: "Is there an accident on this road segment?"

<TRAFFICML_REALTIME>
  <RW DE="Highway 101" LI="..." PBT="...">
    <FIS>
      <FI>
        <TMC>
          <PC>32451</PC>
          <DE>Near Exit 42</DE>
        </TMC>
        <CF>
          <TY>TR</TY>
          <SP>25.5</SP>
          <SU>45.0</SU>
          <FF>65.0</FF>
          <JF>2.5</JF>
          <CN>0.85</CN>
        </CF>
      </FI>
    </FIS>
  </RW>
</TRAFFICML_REALTIME>

To answer "is there an accident," you need to:

1. Parse the XML structure
2. Navigate through RW → FIS → FI → CF
3. Decode the TY (type) field
4. Cross-reference with TMC location codes
5. Calculate severity from SP, SU, FF, and JF values
6. Handle missing fields, malformed data, and edge cases

Now multiply this by every type of incident, every road segment, and every edge case. Your "simple integration" is now a full-time maintenance burden.

The Versioning Nightmare

Both TomTom and HERE regularly update their APIs. Sometimes with notice. Sometimes without. Your parser that worked yesterday might break tomorrow because:

• A new optional field was added that your code doesn't expect
• An enumeration value changed meaning
• Endpoint URLs were reorganized
• Rate limits were adjusted
• Authentication mechanisms were updated

Every API change requires you to revisit your parsing logic, test edge cases, and deploy updates. This is engineering time that could be spent building features.

The Multi-Source Problem

Most production systems need multiple traffic data sources for coverage and redundancy. TomTom might have better data in Europe while HERE covers North America better. Waze captures incidents that neither commercial provider catches.

Now you're maintaining three different parsers. Three different schemas. Three different update cycles. And you need to merge them into a consistent format for your routing engine.

The Documentation Gap

Both TomTom and HERE have extensive documentation. The problem isn't quantity—it's accuracy and completeness.

You'll discover:

• Documented fields that don't appear in actual responses
• Undocumented fields that your production data contains
• Example responses that don't match the schema definition
• Edge cases that only emerge at scale

Your engineers become experts in traffic API archaeology, digging through forum posts and Stack Overflow answers to understand why their parser fails on 0.1% of responses.

A Better Approach: Universal Ontology

What if you didn't have to write parsers for every traffic API? What if all traffic data—TomTom, HERE, Waze, 511 feeds, computer vision—came in a single, consistent format?

That's the idea behind a traffic data ontology. One schema. Any source. Routing-ready output.

{
  "incident_id": "ARG_101N_42",
  "classification": {
    "type": "collision",
    "severity": "major",
    "confidence": 0.92
  },
  "impact": {
    "lanes_affected": 2,
    "delay_minutes": 25
  },
  "routing_recommendation": {
    "action": "avoid",
    "expires_at": "2025-01-15T15:30:00Z"
  }
}

No XML parsing. No proprietary codes. No schema archaeology. Just clean, consistent data your routing engine can consume immediately.

The Path Forward

The traffic data industry is stuck in a legacy paradigm where every provider invents their own format. This made sense when APIs were rare and developers were expected to adapt.

Today, developer time is the scarcest resource. The providers who win will be those who make integration trivial—not those who force teams to become experts in proprietary schemas.