An intelligent vehicle highway system collects and provides real-time traffic data to a vehicle traveling on a continental roadway network. A digitized continental roadway network has nodes interconnected by links that define a digitized representation of the continental roadway network. To enable intelligent data collection and navigation over large expanses of the continental network, which would otherwise be computationally onerous, the digitized continental roadway network is partitioned into a plurality of digitized roadway subnetworks. The onboard vehicle navigation device has a processor for executing an application that instantiates a subset of the digitized roadway subnetworks in a vicinity of a current position of the vehicle to collect and provide relevant real-time traffic data to the vehicle in a computationally efficient manner.