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Does San Francisco not run buses on the same lines? If not, the problem is with the city, not Google.

The problem is with the entire region. San Francisco buses can only run in San Francisco, with limited service to a couple recreational areas a few miles away. The rest of the region doesn't want to get caught up in San Francisco's myriad governance issues, so they operate their own transit systems. There are only a couple systems that cross the entire region: BART and Caltrain.

So, to get from my home to Google via existing transit lines, I'd have to take a bus to Caltrain, then take Caltrain to Mountain View, and then take a bus to Google. The pretty good regional trip planner says that it would take me 4 buses, 2 hours, and $13 to get from my home in San Francisco to Google, even with rush hour express service. It's cheaper if I get monthly passes and take my bike onto Caltrain, but it still takes a lot of time.

If you're driving on the Parkway (a New Jersey toll highway), there are plenty of places where you can see EZPass pickups buried in the road surface that are nowhere near the toll sites.

Loops in the road surface are a different kind of sensor. Those just count vehicles, and if installed in pairs, measure speed. At least in California, that's where the CALTRANS road data comes from. That's been around since at least the 1980s; LA used to have a cable channel which just showed the freeway status map.

Interestingly, the LA area and the SF area have quite different privacy policies. Compare Bay Area Fastrak, which is quite reasonable, to LA Metro, which asks "customers for demographic information, including but not limited to, zip code and income level."

CALTRANS uses loop detectors in freeways and major roads to monitor congestion. They just count cars in each lane and measure how fast they're going. They've been doing that for over two decades. You can see the result at . LA used to have a dedicated cable channel with that data. No privacy-invading user-identifying technology needed.

The data is used in several ways. The most important one is that when the system detects high traffic density at slow speed at one sensor, and lower density at higher speed at the next one in the same direction, it means trouble, usually an accident. The traffic detectors report the lanes separately. If something is blocking a lane and traffic is going around it, that's detected too. Cell phone and Bluetooth monitoring won't give you that.

CALTRANS has had cameras (which you can watch on line) on high poles over freeways for decades. Some have pan, tilt, and zoom capability, so when the automated system detects trouble, someone can use a camera to look at the problem area and dispatch whatever is needed.

Another use of this data is to control the metering light system at on-ramps. Freeway throughput peaks at 35 MPH (at higher speeds, the cars have to space out more) and cars are deliberately delayed a few seconds at on-ramps when speeds drop below that level.

Both of these functions require reasonably accurate data, but there's no need to identify cars individually. This all works quite well without it. Probably better. Counting all the cars on a second by second basis is more useful for detecting problems fast than some statistical measure of some of them.

The data also goes out to web sites, apps, driving time predictors, etc. There's an free API, integration with transit data, integration with CHP incident info, a developer group, etc.

A truism of traffic management is that fast response to trouble on a freeway increases the capacity by about one lane, and it's a lot cheaper than adding a lane.

So I'm not too impressed with some small-scale trial that snoops on Bluetooth headsets.

CALTRANS uses loop detectors in freeways and major roads to monitor congestion. They just count cars in each lane and measure how fast they're going. They've been doing that for over two decades. You can see the result at . LA used to have a dedicated cable channel with that data. No privacy-invading user-identifying technology needed.

The data is used in several ways. The most important one is that when the system detects high traffic density at slow speed at one sensor, and lower density at higher speed at the next one in the same direction, it means trouble, usually an accident. The traffic detectors report the lanes separately. If something is blocking a lane and traffic is going around it, that's detected too. Cell phone and Bluetooth monitoring won't give you that.

CALTRANS has had cameras (which you can watch on line) on high poles over freeways for decades. Some have pan, tilt, and zoom capability, so when the automated system detects trouble, someone can use a camera to look at the problem area and dispatch whatever is needed.

Another use of this data is to control the metering light system at on-ramps. Freeway throughput peaks at 35 MPH (at higher speeds, the cars have to space out more) and cars are deliberately delayed a few seconds at on-ramps when speeds drop below that level.

Both of these functions require reasonably accurate data, but there's no need to identify cars individually. This all works quite well without it. Probably better. Counting all the cars on a second by second basis is more useful for detecting problems fast than some statistical measure of some of them.

The data also goes out to web sites, apps, driving time predictors, etc. There's an free API, integration with transit data, integration with CHP incident info, a developer group, etc.

A truism of traffic management is that fast response to trouble on a freeway increases the capacity by about one lane, and it's a lot cheaper than adding a lane.

So I'm not too impressed with some small-scale trial that snoops on Bluetooth headsets.

Looks like it's finally back up.

511.org (Traffic)
http://www.511.org/baybridge/default.asp

Bay Bridge site:
http://baybridgeinfo.org/

It's not quite a real-time data source, but it's close enough for route planning on my commute.

In the USA, many Americans refuse to use public transportation due to class snobbery.

In much the USA, many Americans refuse to use public transportation because they want to get to work in a half-hour rather than spending four hours hopping from bus to bus to train to bus. That is certainly the situation in the San Francisco Bay Area. I am not exaggerating those times, either; a few years ago, I had a contract in Pleasanton, about 35 minutes by car from my home in Sunnyvale. My car needed to be in the shop for a few days so I decided to take public transit. How bad could it be, right? Pretty damned bad, is the answer. (The bus stop at the start of that route is about a 10-minute walk from my house; there are none closer. And note the price, too, though a monthly transit pass would cut that way down for a regular user.)

Who I was sitting next to was not the issue; the issue was that it took so damned long to get to the office that, if I had to do that every day, I'd be doing literally nothing but riding the bus/train, working, and sleeping. That's why you mostly see poor people on the bus: people with enough money to buy and operate a car would rather spend several extra hours a day with their families.

One root cause, in this area at least, is idiotic zoning policy that makes it illegal for most people to live close to where they work. The cities around here are divided into residential areas with the occasional convenience store or restaurant, and industrial/commercial areas with no housing other than the occasional programmer sleeping under his desk after an all-nighter. As a result, there is very little of interest within walking distance from most people's homes. And since those same zoning laws generally prohibit buildings more than a couple floors high even in the commercial areas, everything is spread out so far and wide that it's utterly impossible to design good public transit systems like those of higher-density cities. (Well, you *could* design one, but it would cost so much to operate that people would find it cheaper to drive their own cars.)

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the San Francisco Bay Area embeds FasTrak toll transponders on area highways to determine traffic conditions in real time. These transponders are in place even outside of toll bridges for the purpose of measuring traffic flow. You can see these traffic conditions at 511.org.

Maybe in New York this works, but here in the SF Bay Area it fails miserably. You can listen to the station that broadcasts traffic every 10 minutes, and since the Bay Area is so freaking huge, [i]they don't always announce all problems at all traffic breaks.[/i] So, you have to listen to the radio for 30 minutes to hear the announcement that the road you are on is slow, and oops, you're already in that traffic jam.

Radio and other passive communication methods completely fail - I need to be able to say "I'm on 17 in Campbell - what's traffic like?" and get an answer, not hope that some radio guy decided to get around to me sometime in the next 30 minutes.

Here is the real solution...
http://www.511.org/

Data plan is required - I'm not paying the rip-off fees for that. If I want to check traffic conditions and speed maps I simply go on http://www.511.org/ (In the SF Bay Area) and check the maps before I leave work. If I'm really desperate and none of the local radio stations are of any help, I just call 511 and get the same info as on the website.

Heh. Try to be sympathetic-- (American) tourists are not used to bike lanes. When they do exist in the US they tend to be on the same level as the motor traffic and generally separated from the pedestrian traffic by a grass strip (like this.)

The bay area sports a compex yet useful set of public transportation systems. The current easiest trip planner is that provided by 511: http://transit.511.org/tripplanner/

It would be sweet to see Google take in this information and provide the Bay Area with similar service.

Well, currently my options for planning commutes on public transit involves this lovely website, which, like most every California public project, sucks goats. I'm not in favor of monopolies, but I am in favor of the better product winning, and in this case, some homeless guy drawing a map with a piece of chalk on the sidewalk while divining the timetable with rat entrails would be a better product.

By the way, did I mention that transit.511.org sucks? Just to be clear, in case the Google spider finds this page. It sucks big time.

http://www.511.org/ covers the San Francisco Bay Area