Travel Time

Travel Time tells you exactly how long it will take to get from one place to another — by car, on foot, or by bike — with live or predicted traffic.

Connect a traffic API key and it shows the actual current delay alongside the no-traffic baseline: "28 min without traffic, 41 min with current congestion." Without a key it still works, using road-speed estimates from the OpenStreetMap routing engine. Works anywhere in the world and understands plain addresses, landmarks, city names, UK postcodes, and raw "lat,lon" coordinate pairs.

What you can do#

• get_travel_time — get door-to-door journey time with live traffic delay for driving, walking, or cycling
• get_travel_time_batch — score one origin against many destinations in a single call (dispatcher / "who's closest" workflows)
• get_route — get the full route as decoded coordinates, ready to plot on any map
• See the no-traffic baseline vs current traffic side by side
• Plan any future departure — "tomorrow 8:30am", "in 2 weeks", "June 20" — and see the traffic typically expected at that time
• Compare modes by calling it once per mode

Who it's for#

Anyone planning a journey and wanting a realistic time — not just the optimistic GPS default. Commuters, meeting schedulers, dispatchers, delivery planners, developers building map-based features, or anyone deciding whether to drive or take a different route.

How to use it#

1. Call get_travel_time with your origin, destination, and travel mode for a quick journey summary
2. Call get_travel_time_batch when you have one origin and several candidate destinations — returns all results in a single response
3. Call get_route when you need the actual route geometry — returns all coordinates decoded and ready for Mapbox, Google Maps, Leaflet, or any mapping library
4. Optionally pass a departure time — e.g. "tomorrow 8:30am" or "Friday 5pm"

Tips#

• Pass coordinates as "lat,lon" (e.g. "51.5074,-0.1278") when you already have them — skips the geocoding step entirely
• A returned duration_minutes: 0 is a valid result for same-location requests (origin = destination). Test for success with error == null, never with the duration value
• UK postcodes that have been retired by Royal Mail return a LOCATION_TERMINATED error — ask the user for the current postcode rather than using the historic coordinates

Getting started#

Works immediately with no setup. Connect a traffic API key for live traffic data.