How Mapbox Directions services work | Help

Mapbox Directions services power navigation experiences with intelligent routing, accurate travel time estimates, and real-time traffic awareness. This guide breaks down how the Mapbox routing engine calculates routes for different transportation modes, how travel times are estimated using map and traffic data, and where real-time and typical traffic conditions are available around the world. Whether you're building turn-by-turn directions, delivery optimizations, or isochrone visualizations, understanding these fundamentals will help you make the most of our directions-related APIs.

The directions-related APIs include:

The routing network

The Mapbox routing network can create routes and optimized trips, and is used to calculate the most efficient path for a given mode of transportation (driving, cycling, and walking). The routing network includes a robust network of roads and paths (also known as ways) with distinct attributes like speed limits, turn lane restrictions, mode of travel, and accessibility for bikes and pedestrians.

Ways

A way is an OpenStreetMap term used to describe an ordered list of nodes (points) which normally also has at least one tag, or description. For the purposes of the Mapbox Navigation service APIs, ways can be roads, foot paths, or bicycle lanes.

Travel times

The Mapbox Directions API, Matrix API, and Optimization API all provide estimated trip durations. The time it takes to travel from one point to another is determined by many factors, including:

The routing profile used (walking, cycling, driving, driving-traffic).
The speed stored in the maxspeed tag in OpenStreetMap.
Traffic derived from real-time telemetry data (when the traffic profile is used).

Traffic data

Incorporate real-time and typical traffic data using the mapbox/driving-traffic routing profile into route selection and ETA generation with the Mapbox Directions API, Map Matching API, Matrix API, either into computing areas of reachability with the Mapbox Isochrone API, or add a traffic layer to road geometries on a visual map. Read more about our traffic tileset in Mapbox data.

The mapbox/driving-traffic routing profile is available globally, but the availability of traffic varies by country. Real-time traffic shows speeds that have been directly observed in the last 15 minutes. Real-time traffic data is useful if there are atypical traffic patterns (for example, during severe weather events or accidents).

When real-time traffic conditions are not available, typical traffic conditions will be used instead. Typical traffic is an estimate for traffic speeds at a specific location, at a specific time, based on historical observations. Typical traffic data reflects normal traffic conditions during a typical week.