Navigation technologies company TomTom has announced the introduction of TomTom Traffic in Japan. This extends the service’s reach to 69 countries with a combined population of more than 5 billion people.

TomTom Traffic covers secondary and surface roads, broad coverage, low latency and high GPS probe density. The service offers up-to-date travel information such as traffic jams, and also uses self-generated incident messages for road closures, roadworks and accidents.

Ralf-Peter Schäfer, vice president of TomTom Traffic, said, “Traffic congestion remains a major problem for many countries around the world – particularly in larger metropolitan areas such as in Japan. With rapid developments in autonomous driving and an increased focus on smarter cities, accurate and fresh traffic information is playing an increasingly important role.”

TomTom is increasingly providing Lane-Level Traffic, a feature that is critical to autonomous driving. Already able to detect traffic on different lanes at junctions, TomTom Traffic also can now differentiate between traffic flow on High Occupancy Vehicles lanes and regular lanes.

Already in 2017, TomTom Traffic has been introduced to an additional 16 countries, and the service is expected to be launched in several additional countries in the coming months. TomTom says this continuous growth is supported by the supply of source data it receives from more than 500 million connected devices*, demonstrating the scalability of the TomTom Traffic technology.

*TomTom Traffic is sourced by more than 500 million smartphones, cars and portable navigation devices providing GPS data points.