The EWS ("Entfernungswerk Strasse") mainly consists of precalculated truck distances and is the de facto standard in the transport sector. You have quick and direct access to these distances via relations all over Europe.
Data Basis
Core of the EWS are two square matrices containing the truck distances between reference locations:
- Region EUROPE with more than 14,000 reference locations and about 200 million relations
- Region GERMANY with more than 10,000 reference locations and about 100 million relations
The density of the reference locations depends on the settlement structure and the economic importance. Please note that the density of the reference locations in Germany is higher using the region GERMANY than using EUROPE and therefore the accuracy of the distances increases.
In addition, the EWS consists of a database with more than 500,000 locations, among them more than 100,000 locations in Germany. All locations are assigned to the nearest reference location in the European distance matrix. The locations in Germany are also assigned to the nearest location in the German distance matrix. As the number of locations is very high, it is not possible to include all of them in the distance matrices and so it is handled via the assignment to "representative" reference locations.
Toll distances for trucks are available for Germany and Austria.
The EWS data is updated once per year. You have the possibility to use all data from 2016 onwards.
Location Types
There are three different location types:
- CITY represented by country code, postal code and locality (e.g. city and/or subdistrict name)
- PORT represented by country code and port name
- BORDER represented by country code and border name (city names of the two countries, i.e. 'Kehl Strasbourg')
One use case for BORDER is to increase the accuracy of the resulting distance. For example, if the start location is in Germany and the destination location is in another European country, you can obviously use the region EUROPE. A better result is possible by using the region GERMANY from the start to the German border (if known) and from this border to the destination using region EUROPE.