In August 2025, Google launched a product that quietly changes how every road authority sees their network. Here's what RMI actually is, how to activate it, and what it can't do — written by a partner who helped bring it to market.
That one distinction is what most agencies miss — and what makes the difference between a $250K pilot that ships and one that stalls in procurement.
Roads Management Insights (RMI) is a Google Maps Platform service that gives public-sector road operators access to anonymized movement data from Google Maps. It was announced on August 25, 2025, with named early adopters including Colorado DOT (I-70), Abertis (Spain), and CERTH (Greece).
Unlike consumer Google Maps, RMI is built for agencies. You define the road network you care about through the Roads Selection API, and Google delivers historical travel-time patterns and near-real-time speed intervals to your BigQuery project — where your team is expected to build the dashboards, alerting, and decisions on top.
"RMI gives you the signal. It does not give you the answer."
RMI delivers three kinds of data through three delivery mechanisms. Here's each one, plainly.
Typical speeds and travel times by day-of-week and time-of-day, built from months of aggregated movement. The foundation for planning, corridor studies, and before/after analysis.
Current speed intervals per road segment, refreshed approximately every two minutes. The signal behind live dashboards, incident detection, and dynamic re-routing.
The interface you use to define which road network RMI covers for your agency — segment by segment, region by region. Your pricing scales with selection size.
RMI is a public-sector product. Knowing where it fits — and where it doesn't — saves months of wasted procurement.
Honest comparison from a team that has deployed all four. Pricing is ballpark — real numbers depend on network scope.
Looking for a specific head-to-head? See TraffiCure vs INRIX, vs TomTom Move, vs HERE, vs Kapsch, or vs traditional camera ITMS.
We're Google's partner. We're also honest about where the product falls short — because that's what separates pilots that ship from pilots that don't.
Rural segments and low-traffic suburbs can thin out, especially at night. When there aren't enough cars, there isn't enough signal.
RMI sees consumer movement. Freight-only corridors and private-fleet routes under-report. Pair with INRIX or probe data if that's your use case.
Two-minute latency is fine for dashboards and planning. It's not fine for adaptive signals or anything needing sub-second response.
No dashboards, alerting, incident correlation, or stakeholder reporting out of the box. Expect 4–6 months of engineering work to self-build the layer above.
Whether you're starting from zero or already have RMI in BigQuery, there's a path that fits. Pick the one that matches where you are.
The realistic timeline from picking RMI to having your first operational dashboard in front of engineers.
Define your road network through the Roads Selection API. Sign the Google RMI contract. First BigQuery data flowing by week three.
Connect TraffiCure to your BigQuery project. Configure thresholds, alerting, and incident workflows for your specific corridors.
Dashboards in front of the operations team. First incidents detected. Weekly tuning based on real usage. Statewide rollout prep.
The questions agencies actually ask in the first conversation. Expand what's useful, ignore the rest.
A working demo with your actual road network loaded. Dashboards, alerts, and a realistic scoped plan for your agency — built during the call.
Book a demo →