Editor’s note: Today’s article comes from Antonio Durán. Abertis Global Innovation Head and Xavier Daura. Abertis Future Road Lab Manager. They share how Abertis, a global leader in mobility infrastructure management, is making road mobility safer, more efficient, and more sustainable using Roads Management Insights.
As a leader in mobility infrastructure management, our purpose is to make roads and traffic safer, more efficient, and more sustainable by combining operational excellence with a strong innovation agenda. Through Beyond Roads, we work with technology partners and the innovation ecosystem to bring digital capabilities into mobility management and help our customers—road users and public administrations—anticipate challenges rather than simply react to them.
Our approach focuses on operating infrastructure with a clear emphasis on safety, sustainability, and efficiency. We continuously improve how we monitor and manage traffic, incidents, and network performance, and increasingly complement traditional operational levers with data-driven decision-making. The goal is simple: act earlier, respond better, and deliver a more reliable experience to road users while supporting the objectives of public authorities.
We serve two main customer groups. For road users, we focus on delivering smoother traffic—reducing congestion where possible, improving safety, and ensuring a reliable travel experience. For administrations and public stakeholders, we act as a long-term partner that brings together operational expertise and innovation, supporting safer and more sustainable roads and enabling better planning and decision-making through high-quality data and analytics.
Partnering with Google to scale mobility intelligence
Our partnership with Google is important to us because it is a genuine collaboration where we are jointly developing road management services designed to reduce traffic congestion, improve road safety, and reduce pollution caused by road users. We are not simply adopting a product; we are actively contributing operational insight to help shape it. Our shared objective is to bring higher-quality mobility intelligence to road operators and public authorities—more reliable data, higher granularity, and faster insights—so decisions can be made earlier and with greater confidence. Ultimately, our goal is to translate analytics into operational action: safer roads, fewer disruptions, and more efficient network management.
At the core, we are leveraging Google Maps Platform Roads Management Insights, accessed through Google Cloud’s BigQuery environment, together with Google Cloud’s advanced analytics and AI capabilities. This combination allows us to analyze traffic patterns, detect anomalies, and develop predictive models with the scalability and robustness required for real operational use cases.
Working with Google feels like a true partnership: open, collaborative, and focused on building solutions that work in real-world conditions. We bring operational reality and customer needs; Google brings product excellence and scale—together we iterate quickly and learn continuously.
Translating insights to improve safety and performance
We use Roads Management Insights to better understand how our road networks behave over time and under different conditions. This includes identifying recurring congestion patterns, detecting abnormal situations earlier, and translating insights into operational responses or planning recommendations that improve safety and performance. We are also preparing to incorporate additional data sources included in Google’s roadmap, which will further enhance our real-time situational awareness and support more informed decision-making.
What is unique is the combination of data quality, granularity, and the ability to operationalize insights through a scalable analytics environment. Roads Management Insights allows us to move beyond descriptive reporting toward proactive management—understanding recurring patterns, detecting issues earlier, and supporting better interventions for safety and traffic efficiency. The ability to define variable-length road segments, rather than relying on fixed segmentation, provides additional precision and adaptability compared to other solutions.
Roads Management Insights strengthens our ability to act earlier and, in some cases, anticipate. It helps identify congestion patterns, understand what is driving slow traffic, and support faster responses to incidents. It also enables road authorities to identify accident-prone areas and implement targeted safety measures, supporting forecasting and mitigation before congestion or safety issues escalate.
Roads Management Insights in action
In the initial phase of testing Roads Management Insights, we are validating our solution in real operating environments, including a first deployment on the C-32 in Barcelona and within A4 Holding in Italy. Analytical development and model building are carried out through Abertis’ Future Road Lab, which focuses on advanced traffic management, connected mobility, and real-time monitoring.
The main impact is a clear capability uplift: higher-resolution visibility into traffic patterns and disruptions, and a stronger foundation for improving incident detection and proactive management. Thanks to Google’s high market penetration, data availability remains robust even during very low traffic periods, such as nighttime. As deployments scale, we expect these capabilities to translate into measurable improvements in safety, traffic efficiency, and sustainability outcomes.
Looking to the future of infrastructure management
Beyond our operational role, it is important to highlight our commitment to innovation with purpose. Through Beyond Roads and the Future Road Lab, we build practical solutions that can be adopted by real operators and administrations, always with a strong focus on safety and sustainability. Our objective is to be a trusted partner shaping the future of mobility through concrete and measurable progress.
Together with Google, we are co-developing and deploying Roads Management Insights to transform high-quality mobility data into actionable intelligence. This partnership strengthens our ability to manage traffic proactively, improve safety outcomes, and deliver smarter mobility solutions for both road users and public authorities.
