En route' with Open Data
New decree on French Traffic Data
The French government wants to harness the power of Open Data and a great way to facilitate this is to compile and structure the data. A good example of data that can be very valuable but that is very much spread around the country is traffic data. At the moment, information about traffic on county roads is collected and presented on the website of the concerned local authority in the form of maps, tables or hardly reusable files. This leads to a large amount of locations where data about local traffic can be found in a plurality of forms.
To overcome the challenges this creates and to make the data centrally accessible, the government ordered a new decree on locally held traffic data. This decree obliges local authorities to electronically transmit their traffic data to the central government at least once a year. It will also specify how the data should be collected and processed, creating a normalisation of the data at source level. As the local authorities are already recording their traffic data, this new decree will not impose major new obligations for the authorities but will lead to a big improvement in the accessibility of this data.
Once collected at the level of the state, the traffic data will be brought together and published as Open Data by the central government. The centralisation will make it easier for (local) public bodies to obtain insights into the circulation of traffic on a wider level and provides new opportunities for the private sector to develop applications. Want to know more about the developments regarding traffic data in France? Read more by following the link below.
