Any way to access archived data?

7 posts / 0 new

Wed, 12/28/2016 - 05:31

qcRoads

As I'm building my application (Python3) and working with the Traffic API, I find myself sort of 'guessing' at what the road information will be for a specific part of the road I want to monitor.

For example, say I want to only monitor is a single bridge like the one our town calls the 'Centennial' bridge which can be seen here: http://mapq.st/2iDUv7N

Within the JSON response, I'm checking the 'parameterizedDescription' field called 'roadName' for (and I'm guessing here): Centennial Brg

Then, to double-check myself I'm guessing at two other fields (fromLocation & toLocation) with Davenport in the from and Rock Island in the to.

That way if there is a backup on the bridge (car broke down, etc) I should be able to catch it in the feed, right?

So my question is: Are there any archived feeds that I can access or perhaps a better way to detect sections of roads or bridges rather than guessing at them?

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Wed, 12/28/2016 - 12:51

MQDennisClarke

RE: Any way to access archived data?

The Traffic API does not have archived data; we are focused on what's happening in near realtime. I think you can focus on a particular section of road using the bounding box input for the Traffic API (https://developer.mapquest.com/documentation/traffic-api/incidents/get/). If you saved the value "41.51976, -90.58494,41.51057, -90.57755" as the bounding box for the Centennial Bridge in Davenport IA, you can reuse it in your traffic requests to check for incidents on/near that bridge. The Traffic API does not use road name input; you'll need to use the bounding box values. Thanks.

Thu, 12/29/2016 - 17:18

(Reply to #2)

qcRoads

Thank you for your quick

Thank you for your quick answer, sorry I didn't reply sooner. I couldn't find a feature on this forum to alert me when a new post or reply is made. I'll look into your suggestion. =)

Thu, 12/29/2016 - 18:47

(Reply to #3)

qcRoads

OK, so I read your reply

OK, so I read your reply again and then looked at my Python code and realized that I am using a bounding box of:

&boundingBox=41.61030862727467%2C-90.31105041503906%2C41.43294592970754%2C-90.7247543334961

I'm using a larger one to cover my entire area so I can catch all 4 or so bridges I'd like to monitor. Then I'm looping over any results to look for the aforementioned data sets; something like this:

def get_i74_match_southbound(params):
if params['roadName'] == 'I-74':
if params['fromLocation'] == 'Davenport' and params['toLocation'] == 'Moline':
return True
else:
return False

I'm hoping that any events that come in will end up matching something like this to further shorten what I'm reporting on. It just feels weird to have to just keep tracking the feed until something happens and then adjust later these variables in my code. I used the test service to find other events and tried to mimic what was coming back on those areas and I'm 97.65% confident that mine will work but was looking for a more sure-fire way. =) How about a feature request? =)

Tue, 01/10/2017 - 07:44

(Reply to #4)

MQBrianCoakley

The traffic api was built to

The traffic api was built to find incidents in an area rather than find out if there is an incident at a specific place. This is how MapQuest.com uses the api. For a sure-fire way to determine if there is an incident on the bridges, you could create a request with a bounding box around each bridge to know for sure it was that specific place.

Wed, 01/11/2017 - 13:32

partyk1d24

This topic doesn't talk about

This topic doesn't talk about historic records at all. Are these just purged? Do I have to maintain them myself?

Fri, 01/13/2017 - 09:05

(Reply to #6)

MQBrianCoakley

The traffic api is not

The traffic api is not intended to display historic data and storage of api results is against the Terms & Conditions. It's built to display current conditions only.