Predicted Traffic Learns When to Trust Recent Roads
The adaptive selector described in the second half of this post stayed an experiment: the June export that used it was built and loaded into Valhalla tiles for testing, and production kept one 180-day half-life for every road. Local road time, the guard for empty windows and the 180-day half-life are what production traffic data uses today.
One edge of a motorway in eastern Germany was driven at about 120 km/h until March 2024. For the next twenty months the GPS traces on it ran at 85 to 95 km/h, and since December 2025 they are back above 120. By 3 June, the last day of our June observations, the edge had 1,503 of them, and their plain median was 99.9 km/h:
Each dot is one traversal, day and night together, faded by how much it counts. Our traffic data gives every road a day speed and a night speed for Valhalla, and for this road the plain median is wrong by more than 20 km/h. This post is about how much an old observation should count, and about the decisions that have to be right before that question even makes sense.
