Connected Vehicle Data: Everything you need to know in 2025 and beyond

Getting data on how vehicles move has traditionally been a lengthy process. Whether you’re installing permanent sensors at key intersections, laying down temporary tube counters, or surveying drivers on their travel habits, gathering data in the usual ways takes time, and can also face limitations on spatial and temporal coverage or be subject to low sample sizes and bias. 

For a long time, that has meant that public agencies, consulting firms, researchers, and businesses haven’t had detailed insight into how vehicles are moving — especially in real-time — making it difficult to respond quickly to incidents, understand the causes of slowdowns, or address safety issues before crashes happen. Likewise, getting data on how vehicles move on all roads has been impractical, limiting insights into big picture traffic patterns, including the ability to understand how conditions on one road impact those on another. 

But connected vehicle data (CVD) is changing the way these experts monitor roadways and make decisions. So, what is connected vehicle data, where does it come from, and how can you use it? In this article, we’ll answer all these questions and explore real-world examples of CVD in action.

What is Connected Vehicle Data?

Connected vehicle data is generated by the steady pings of personal vehicles with built-in location technology (i.e., connected vehicles). These pings capture information on where and how these vehicles move, which can then be used to reveal travel patterns. In addition to location data, these types of vehicles can also send information on their speed, elevation, direction, and more in real time. 

Once these data points are collected, processed, and anonymized (all of which can happen in under a minute), they can be used to identify safety hazards, road incidents, congested corridors, atypical driving patterns, and lots more, just moments after they occur.

Core components of Connected Vehicle Data

Connected vehicle data is a unique data source with distinct advantages. These key components are worth keeping in mind, and will be explored further in the following sections: 

• To protect privacy, CVD should undergo rigorous privacy protections to contain no personally identifiable information. StreetLight ensures our CVD meets this standard—which means granular vehicle data without identifying individual drivers or their data within the dataset. 

• Connected vehicle data is generated by a growing share of vehicles on the road. While not every vehicle is connected, this expanding dataset is large and representative enough to provide valuable insights into travel patterns. However, it does not capture non-vehicle modes of transportation like biking and walking, so it is important to supplement this data with additional data sets. 

• Connected vehicle data can be transmitted and processed in less than a minute from anywhere that connected cars and trucks go, offering unmatched recency and coverage that can benefit many use cases. 

• In addition to generating common vehicle metrics like roadway volumes, origin-destination patterns, and vehicle speeds, CVD can also offer insights that are difficult to derive from other data sources, such as hard braking and acceleration patterns. 

Key benefits of Connected Vehicle Data

With increasing numbers of connected cars and trucks on the road, CVD is quickly becoming a leading source of transportation information used by researchers, consulting firms, commercial businesses, and public agencies to understand how drivers move. Because it can be collected and processed in real time, CVD can offer valuable insights on past driving patterns as well as how these patterns are changing minute-to-minute.

For change in average trip length on Labor Day Friday, Raleigh and Minneapolis rank first and second, with Richmond coming in third. This ranking closely tracks the ranking for increase in share of trips out-out-town. Charlotte and Birmingham are the only cities that appear in the top five for increased avg. trip travel length but not in the list for increased share of trips out of the metro.

Real-time and historical insights 

Because CVD can be collected, processed, and available to analyze in under a minute, it can be particularly helpful for traffic operations, event management, construction management, and other scenarios where you need to monitor current traffic conditions and respond quickly. 

CVD can even be used to generate automated alerts so that operators know instantly when and where traffic queues, slowdowns, or unsafe traffic conditions are forming and address them early before they create major issues. 

Additionally, planners and operators may appreciate CVD for its ability to deliver insights on the recent past. Rather than waiting months for mobility data to become available, transportation professionals using CVD can analyze traffic patterns from the past days, weeks, or months to assist in diagnosing issues, assessing potential solutions, or evaluating the impacts of recent changes. 

Connected vehicle data also allows analysts to compare what’s happening right now to historical baselines to provide context for current conditions and assist in planning efforts. For example, historical CVD can be useful when planning lane or road closures during a time that won’t stall traffic during necessary road construction.

Granular metrics from actual vehicles

Because the pings from connected cars and trucks are tied to the vehicle’s precise location, elevation, and other attributes, the metrics derived from CVD can be highly granular and aren’t only tied to specific road segments. That means you could even analyze where connected cars go off-road or zoom in on driving behaviors at a very specific point on the roadway, or within specific lanes.

Additionally, while other types of mobility data can be generated by smart devices like cell phones and vehicle movements inferred from them (e.g., a driver’s cell phone sending information on their location while in the car), CVD comes from the vehicle itself. That adds an extra layer of confidence that the data is representing real vehicle movements, which can be especially beneficial for certain use cases like transportation modeling. 

Hard braking and acceleration insights

Connected cars and trucks also transmit highly granular information on their speed, direction, and more that can be used to derive information on dangerous driving patterns like hard braking and acceleration—insights that are difficult to derive from other data sources. You can even go so far to distinguish between mild and extreme changes in speed, filter by instantaneous speed, and by the event’s turning motion to better assess road risk. When a connected vehicle slams on the brakes or accelerates quickly, that can be a leading indicator that something isn’t working as intended about a given road or intersection. For example, it could reveal that recent changes to signal timing, lane width/number, or signage may be creating problematic conditions. 

Looking at aggregated data on these types of braking and acceleration events can help planners pinpoint places where road safety interventions may help reduce crashes and near-misses and quickly measure safety intervention impacts without waiting years for crash data.

Real-world applications of Connected Vehicle Data

The near-instant processing speed and granularity of CVD make it particularly useful for transportation planning and operations use cases like responding to road incidents faster, identifying safety issues before crashes happen, timing traffic signals to relieve congested corridors, and more. 

Supporting road safety

Insight into hard braking and acceleration events, which can be derived from CVD, can surface dangerous driving patterns even if they don’t result in crashes, giving transportation professionals the chance to diagnose the potential causes of these dangerous patterns and identify appropriate interventions like infrastructural changes or signal timing. 

For example, the city of Carmel, Indiana used hard braking and acceleration data to evaluate the safety impacts of converting a high-traffic intersection into a multi-lane roundabout, revealing a 32% drop in total hard braking events and an 80% decline in the most severe hard braking events. This kind of data helps explain to city council and the public exactly why they’re making certain decisions and how they support a safer driving experience. 

CVD can also be used to pinpoint current speeding hotspots, enabling targeted mitigation efforts. This case study details how Iowa is using StreetLight’s Connected Vehicle Journeys product for this purpose, as well as for queue detection, incident response, work zone safety monitoring, and more. 

After Iowa started using CVD for these efforts, Skylar Knickerbocker, an ISU engineer on the project noted: 

We actually saw that connected vehicle data improved the performance of our queue warning system—it detected slowdowns faster than traditional sensors.

Revealing before-and-after impacts

Because CVD is delivered almost instantly, it also allows industry professionals to more quickly understand the impact of recent infrastructure or policy changes and deploy further optimizations or roll back changes if necessary. Iowa experts are also seeing these benefits: 

We’re now using the data to do real-time feedback on changes like barrier rails or rumble strips. It’s no longer just assumptions—we see the impacts immediately.
— Skylar Knickerbocker

This ability to speed up before-and-after insights can help justify projects to stakeholders and the public and test whether changes are really working.

Other CVD use cases

Other use cases for connected vehicle data may include: 

• Special events traffic management 
• Lane/road closure and detour planning 
• Work zone safety planning 
• Incident detection and response  
• Real-time communications with the public about travel times, unexpected closures, or other incidents 
• Measuring real-time traffic to trade locations, parks, or amenities 
• Targeting rapid-response congestion management or traffic calming measures where they’re needed 

Why StreetLight is the best provider of Connected Vehicle Data

Now that you know all the advantages of connected vehicle data, how can you start using CVD in your own work? StreetLight strives to make it easy for you to dive in and get what you need, whether it’s bringing the 15+B data points of bulk CVD into your own platforms and tools or using StreetLight’s web-based StreetLight InSight® platform to analyze pre-processed mobility metrics like volumes and speeds. 

StreetLight is the leading provider of transportation data in North America and has long been navigating the landscape of available data sources to deliver the most reliable, high-resolution, full-coverage data available. To learn more about how we source, process, and deliver our CVD metrics, check out our All Vehicles CVD+ Volume Methodology and Validation white paper. Today, we are the largest provider of CVD on the market, with over 10 million connected cars and trucks across all U.S. roadways. 

Customers using our CVD metrics today appreciate the data we provide for its quality and reliability. An engineer at ISU had this to say about using StreetLight’s CVD: 

The granularity is key. We can actually pinpoint the precise location where issues are occurring because of the granularity.
— Skylar Knickerbocker, Engineer IV, ISU

Ways to take advantage of StreetLight’s connected vehicle data

StreetLight offers a full suite of transportation data solutions for everything from planning and operations to commercial and climate—many of these products and services leveraging our exclusive connected vehicle data source. 

StreetLight offers 15 billion+ connected vehicle data points every day from over 10 million unique vehicles per month, with vehicle pings coming in every 3 seconds. That’s a lot of data. For teams with the technical expertise to analyze massive datasets like these, our CVD is available via batch delivery or in real time through our Connected Vehicle Journeys product. 

Even if you don’t use Connected Vehicle Journeys, you can still get the powerful insights CVD provides through many of StreetLight’s other products. For example, Planning Solutions offerings like Transportation Modeling and Transportation Planning, which feature origin-destination analyses, zone activity, home and work locations, or top routes, use our connected vehicle data as a source. 

Other StreetLight products and services using CVD include: 

• Hard Braking & Acceleration & Events 
• Multi-Trip Analytics – metrics like dwell time and tours 
• Visitation & Site Selection – metrics like habitual trip frequencies 

Ready to see if StreetLight’s connected vehicle data can help you? Request a consultation with one of our representatives to get started.