Cities worldwide struggle to quantify the real environmental impact of road transport. NEXQT — a multi-sector digital carbon twin with a strong focus on transport— tackles this challenge with a data‑first philosophy.

By integrating HERE Traffic Analytics and HERE Maps & Data, NEXQT empowers city teams to analyze at least five years of historical mobility , estimate emissions at scale, simulate scenarios, and evaluate policy impact — without roadside sensors.

In this article, I will try to understand how NEXQT ingests, harmonizes, models, and operationalizes HERE data, how machine learning improves accuracy, and why HERE’s data infrastructure unlocks insights cities could never access before.

We have already shared and article on LinkedIn check it out before we get into more developer-oriented aspects of NEXQT solutions.

Measuring Transport Emissions at City Scale

Urban road transport produces 40–60% of city-level GHG emissions. Yet most municipalities lack the large-scale, high‑resolution datasets needed for long‑term traffic and emissions analysis.

Traditional traffic counters almost all vehicles with a great reliability, but only at a limited number of locations. Floating Car Data (FCD) provides network‑wide coverage, but represents only a subset of the fleet. Without harmonizing these complementary datasets, cities struggle to answer fundamental questions such as:

• How has traffic evolved over the past five years, on major or minor set of axis, or neighborhoods?

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• What are the real impacts of new bike lanes or school‑street pedestrianization. Did it generate traffic reports on other road axis?

• How much CO₂ is saved by speed‑limit changes or circulation schemes?

• How do congestion and emissions vary daily, monthly, seasonally?

NEXQT solves this by maintaining a digital carbon twin — a continuously updated, reproducible simulation of a city’s entire road network.

Building the Digital Carbon Twin with Five Years of Historical Analytics

With Carto Explorer, city teams can explore traffic, speed, and emissions metrics for every day in a five‑year window — from a single road segment to an entire district. This enables evidence-based evaluation of:

• Cycling infrastructure

• Bus and transit corridors

• Traffic calming

• Road closures

• Speed policy changes

HERE Traffic Analytics supports five years of historical data, with earliest availability from January 1, 2020, across nearly the entire global road network.

Conceptually, HERE Traffic Analytics works similarly to the Live Traffic API — but operates on historical data instead of real‑time feeds.

📘 Developer guide: https://docs.here.com/traffic-analytics/docs/readme

On 100% of road axis thanks to the coverage of Here datasets NEXQT can deliver citywide daily updates, including:

• Traffic volumes

• Speed distribution

• Congestion levels

• Emissions

• Fuel and vehicle-type distributions

• Air pollution indicators

This keeps the digital twin synchronized with changing mobility patterns.

Supporting Traffic Analytics with HERE Maps

Traffic data alone is not sufficient without a precise and stable road network reference. NEXQT extracts Streets and Z‑Levels from HERE Maps to support:

• Precise topology

• Level-of-detail geometry

• Grade separation & elevation

• Segment connectivity

This ensures traffic data aligns correctly with the physical road infrastructure, including complex interchanges and multi‑level roads.

How NEXQT Processes HERE Data

Using HERE Maps data, NEXQT, first Constructs a Network Graph that

• Builds a routable, sparse graph

• Clusters segments to optimize computation

• Ensures efficient flow distribution in models

This graph forms the backbone of all subsequent traffic and emissions modeling.

With this in place, they can Ingest the Floating Car Data

NEXQT’s pipeline:

• Regularly ingests HERE Traffic Analytics datasets

• Uses a custom Python sparse‑storage framework

• Tracks changes in probe penetration

• Differentiates

  real traffic variation

  vs.

  probe-rate shifts

Here is where HERE’s Traffic Analytics supports flexible query construction using probe data, gap filling, and path-level information

For long-term accuracy it is essential to decompose the statistical model monthly, reflecting Real-world mobility changes and Shifts in FCD representativeness.

Managing Topology Changes Over Time

One of the hardest parts in map making is Topology Change Management and after building the network graph NEXQT has the same challenge.

Every year, NEXQT updates its referential to the latest HERE map version - matching HERE’s yearly update cycle for Traffic Analytics.

NEXQT automatically detects:

• Construction

• Lane modifications

• New cycling infrastructure

• Updated road attributes such as speed limits and turn restrictions

Conclusion

The integration of HERE's Floating Car Data (FCD) with traditional traffic counters fundamentally transformed NEXQT's analytical capabilities. By combining the precision of sparse counter networks with the breadth of FCD coverage, supervised machine learning now enables comprehensive citywide traffic estimation - delivering actionable insights on traffic flows, emissions, and congestion patterns across every road segment, every day, for five years of historical analysis.

This foundation unlocks three critical pathways forward: modeling EV-specific emissions and grid impacts as motorization data becomes available; expanding into micromobility analytics through vehicle - class enrichment; and scaling insights through programmatic APIs that power dashboards, geospatial queries, and future intelligent interfaces - all while maintaining HERE compliance and data privacy standards.

What was previously impossible - granular, citywide traffic intelligence without ubiquitous sensor infrastructure - is now operationalized and extensible.

What’s Next?

Interested in building your own mobility‑analytics project?

📘 HERE Traffic Analytics Developer Guide https://docs.here.com/traffic-analytics/docs/readme

📘 HERE Docs - Maps & Data, Location Services https://docs.here.com/

📘 HERE Location Services Category https://docs.here.com/