Reading Your Trip History — What Each Number Actually Means

The trip list looks simple: a date, a distance, a time, an average. The detail screen is where the useful information lives, and several of its figures are routinely misread.

The fields

Distance — the ground covered during the session, accumulated from your position as it changes. This is true distance over the ground, which is why it can differ slightly from your odometer, whose reading depends on wheel circumference.

Total time — from the moment you pressed Start to the moment you stopped. Nothing is excluded.

Duration — the time you were actually moving.

Stop time — total time minus duration. Traffic lights, junctions, the five minutes you sat waiting for someone.

Average speed — distance divided by total time, not by duration. This is the figure most often misread, and the next section explains why it matters.

Maximum speed — the highest single reading recorded during the session.

Why the average looks low

Say you drove 20 km in 40 minutes of total time, of which 10 minutes were spent stationary at lights. Your average speed over the session is 30 km/h. Your average while actually moving was 40 km/h. Neither is wrong; they answer different questions.

The session average answers how long does this journey take me, which is the question that matters when you are deciding when to leave. The moving average answers how fast do I drive, which is the question people think they are asking when they look at the number.

If a route consistently shows a session average far below its moving average, that is a congestion measurement, not a driving measurement.

Reading the map

Every recorded trip keeps its route, drawn on a map in the detail screen, along with the start and finish locations resolved to place names. Two things are worth knowing:

• The route is drawn from the position fixes the receiver produced. In a tunnel or an underground car park there are no fixes, so the line will jump from the entrance to the exit as a straight segment.
• Dense city driving can produce a route that wanders slightly off the road. That is multipath — reflected satellite signals — not an error in the recording.

Using the history for something

A trip log becomes useful the moment you compare entries rather than admire them:

• The same commute on different days shows you which departure time actually costs you the least, in a way that memory does not.
• Maximum speed on a familiar road is a sharper self-check than any impression. Most drivers are surprised at least once.
• Stop time as a share of total time tells you whether a route is slow because of distance or because of congestion. Those two problems have different solutions.

Where the data lives

Trips, speed tests and settings are stored in the app on your iPhone. They are not uploaded to us and we cannot see them. The practical consequence: deleting the app deletes the history, and there is no server-side copy to restore from. Anything you want to keep long term should be recorded elsewhere before you delete anything.

Individual trips can be deleted from the detail screen when you no longer want them.