DrivingOptions class

Specifies the desired time of departure and/or desired assumption of time in traffic calculation for non-transit TravelMode.

May contain the following fields:

• departureTime - specifies the desired time of departure. The departure time may be specified in two cases:

• For requests where the travel mode is transit: You can optionally specify one of departureTime or arrivalTime. If neither time is specified, the departureTime defaults to now (that is, the departure time defaults to the current time).

• For requests where the travel mode is driving: You can specify the departureTime to receive a route and trip duration (response field: durationInTraffic) that take traffic conditions into account. The departureTime must be set to the current time or some time in the future. It cannot be in the past.

Note: If departure time is not specified, choice of route and duration are based on road network and average time-independent traffic conditions. Results for a given request may vary over time due to changes in the road network, updated average traffic conditions, and the distributed nature of the service. Results may also vary between nearly-equivalent routes at any time or frequency.

• trafficModel - specifies the assumptions to use when calculating time in traffic. This setting affects the value returned in the durationInTraffic field in the response, which contains the predicted time in traffic based on historical averages. The trafficModel parameter may only be specified for driving directions where the request includes a departureTime.

The available values for this parameter are:

• bestGuess (default) indicates that the returned durationInTraffic should be the best estimate of travel time given what is known about both historical traffic conditions and live traffic. Live traffic becomes more important the closer the departureTime is to now.
• pessimistic indicates that the returned durationInTraffic should be longer than the actual travel time on most days, though occasional days with particularly bad traffic conditions may exceedthis value.
• optimistic indicates that the returned durationInTraffic should be shorter than the actual travel time on most days, though occasional days with particularly good traffic conditions may be faster than this value.

The default value of bestGuess will give the most useful predictions for the vast majority of use cases. It is possible the bestGuess travel time prediction may be shorter than optimistic, or alternatively, longer than pessimistic, due to the way the bestGuess prediction model integrates live traffic information.