"The world runs on maps," explains HERE Technologies executive Jason Jameson on this week's Highways Voices, "And if you look at from the early days of creating a map, to find directions, or to map out how to move from place to place, it's always been with us as a society. But if you look at what's happened, there's been this shift to digitisation... and having it more accurate... this is really enabled a lot of the things that we take for granted in society - you couldn't do ride sharing, if you didn't have a digital map, you really would struggle to do e-commerce, and logistics would would start to really become very inefficient without digital maps."
In the conversation, the company's Chief Customer Officer explains how maps are put together, kept fresh and keep adding more and more information that can be used by the world's mobility planners and modellers, and Intelligent Transport Systems solutions providers.
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He explains how these added layers are leading to new solutions to change how we travel, such as the detail needed for Electric Vehicles.
"That includes things like charge point point of interest search, multi stop routing, you get a range on map, when you look on the screen and say how far can I drive... and has estimated charging times at each charging station," he says. "It's just designed to very simply allow folks now to take their EVs and plan longer journeys and know that they're not going to get stuck without a charging station and know that they have enough energy to get where they need to go."
And the data goes further than this - "It isn't just about its distance travelled, it's to do with elevation so the topography - you need to know how steep how big the hills are, you need to know the curvature of the road, you need to know even things like road roughness to determine friction."
Jason also discusses autonomous vehicles, the company's latest partnerships with Uber and What3Words and last mile delivery.
You also hear news from our partners, including a former Transport Secretary joining the next ITS UK Enforcement Forum, and why a project in the West Midlands wins Adrian's Accolade this week
