Question

You are planning routes several days or weeks ahead and want to know whether upcoming roadworks will already be visible in the PTV_TrafficIncidents feature layer. You also want to understand whether future traffic congestion caused by those roadworks — such as detour overload or surrounding road congestion — is taken into account in route calculations.

Answer

There is no fixed rule defining how far in advance planned roadworks become available in PTV_TrafficIncidents. Roadworks and closures appear in the layer as soon as they are included in the underlying traffic data feed. In some cases planned roadworks may be visible days or weeks ahead, but this is not guaranteed and varies from case to case.

Traffic information in PTV products reflects the current known traffic situation only. Future traffic situations are not predicted. Secondary effects of planned roadworks are not calculated or anticipated, including:

• additional congestion on diversion routes,
• traffic displacement onto surrounding roads,
• expected queues around the works zone.

This applies regardless of the reference time set in the route calculation request.

Additions hints

• If a customer asks: "Roadworks start in 4 weeks — does PTV already predict the resulting congestion?" — the answer is no. PTV_TrafficIncidents reflects incidents present in the current traffic data; it does not model future network effects.
• The presence of a roadwork in PTV_TrafficIncidents means the closure or restriction is already published in the traffic data. It does not imply that all associated traffic impact has been modelled.
• For future-dated route calculations, using timeConsideration: SNAPSHOT with a future referenceTime will apply historical speed patterns for that time of day/week, but will not incorporate predicted incidents or works-related congestion that does not yet exist in the data.