Method and apparatus for providing information on congestion tendency on a link and using the information

A method and a device for providing and using the traffic congestion tendency information are provided to let drivers reach the destination within a short time by obtaining and storing tendency information about the present traffic congestion and displaying the stored tendency information on a screen or outputting the result in voice according to a given condition. A traffic information encoding method includes the steps of generating tendency information(41) about CTT(Congestion And Travel-Time Information); generating position information corresponding to the tendency information; and generating message management information including the generation time of a CTT message. The CTT message includes message identification information having at least one of a message identifier and version information. The identifier indicating that the tendency information is included is generated together with the tendency information, and the identifier and the tendency information are included in a component.