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Live traffic | Rijwind docs

Live traffic

The live traffic layer adds real-time road conditions on top of the basemap: roads coloured by how freely traffic is flowing, plus an overlay of incidents, roadworks, and closures. It's built from official national road-authority data, normalised into one consistent schema.

Coverage at launch is the Netherlands; more countries roll out on the same layer, so a map that enables traffic today picks them up automatically as they go live.

How it works

The road geometry loads once. A small live-state file — a compact map of road segment → current speed and congestion level — is published about once a minute and fetched by the browser, then painted onto the roads client-side. There's no tile re-fetch and no restyle when conditions change, so the layer stays smooth and cheap: a refresh moves only a few hundred kilobytes, not a whole tileset.

Incidents and roadworks are delivered as a lightweight overlay with the same near-real-time cadence.

Quickstart

The @rijwind/sdk Map wires everything up from your API key:

Code
import { Map, config } from "@rijwind/sdk";
import "@rijwind/sdk/style.css";

config.apiKey = "rw_live_•••YOUR_KEY•••";

const map = new Map({
  container: "map",
  center: [4.9, 52.37],
  zoom: 9,
  traffic: true,
});

Prefer to toggle it at runtime — say, behind a "Traffic" button?

Code
map.enableTraffic();                          // all available countries
map.enableTraffic({ countries: ["NL"] });     // just the Netherlands
map.enableTraffic({ incidents: false });      // flow only, no incident overlay
map.disableTraffic();

The layer keeps its data fresh on its own and pauses polling while the browser tab is hidden. Required source attribution is added to the map's attribution control for you.

What the colours mean

Roads are coloured by a congestion level derived from the current speed relative to that road's free-flow speed:

Colour	Meaning
Green	Free-flowing
Yellow	Moderate
Orange	Slow
Red	Congested / jammed

A road with no live measurement keeps its normal basemap styling rather than being coloured.

Billing

The traffic layer is billed 1 unit per map session — one charge no matter how long the map stays open or how many times the live state refreshes — on top of the 1 unit for the basemap session it rides on. It's drawn from the same monthly unit pool as every other endpoint; there's no separate traffic plan or per-request tile metering. Enabling traffic later in an existing session adds the one extra unit; refreshes are always free.

See Quotas & rate limits for the full cost table.

Without the SDK

The layer is plain MapLibre underneath: a vector tileset for the road geometry (joined to live data with setFeatureState) and a GeoJSON source for incidents. Request GET /tiles/v1/token?session=<id>&traffic=NL — the response includes a traffic block with the CDN base URL and a signed query string valid for every traffic artifact. See the API reference for the response shape. The SDK is the supported path; hand-wiring is possible but you own the polling and the feature-state join yourself.