Slashdot Mirror
Check Traffic Congestion Online
braddk writes "Looks like traffic helicopters will slowly become unnecessary in Denver, as an ongoing construction project implements online traffic data. The traffic is monitored via "vehicle counters" placed at the onramps and in between interchanges. Although only a 10 mile section is currently monitored, plans are to add more sensors as they complete sections of the larger project. They also have a lighter version for mobile phone users.
Click here to see the Flash version
and to check out the current traffic in Denver. Now I can check whether I really want to head to work in the morning." Kinda like that project in Finland.
Atlanta's traffic Sure it is not in pretty flash, but is is much more extensive.
It's great when someone finally implements new and
:)
inventive stuff in real life IT environments. Now
if they could just do it in my country.
I love the idea of getting a sms saying that it's
going to be 3 hours in traffic before you get home
The reporters can sit in their studios and follow the congestions real-time and will report it with regular intervals on the news. Works fine.
Aren't similar systems in use in lotsof other places?
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
The really scary thing is that the 'vehicle counters' use fighter aircraft target aquisition radar! - Wonder if they have the high speed cannon's to go with them?
We've had this in the UK for a decade. It's called traffic master. Speed senors are mounted on freeway bridges all around the country and provide constsnt traffic flow information, which can be relayed to a map display on the dash.
Speed sensors give rather better information for this purpose than car-counters. See http://www.trafficmaster.co.uk/
Guess I'll have to find another excuse for my boss, rather than "The reason I was late was because of heavy traffic".
My <1000 UID is with a hot chick
In the UK and Europe we have the Trafficmaster system. There are blue camera posts at signifcant points along major roads that take you number plate - the system then compares the time between two cameras for each plate to work out congestion. You can subscribe to get the data real time, and its displayed at motorway service stations, etc.
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
This sounds like the Coordinated Highways Action Response Team. It has an interactive map with colored arrows indicating the speed of traffic on both sides of the highway for a variety of roads in the DC/Baltimore area.
(But please don't Slashdot it, or I won't know if it's safe to leave for work!)
You're right, that will cause congestion!
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
A simple car count will yield garbage data because it is the speed of the cars that passes a given point that really matters.
If 10 cars pass a certain point in 5 minutes, that EITHER means that the traffic is fine and smooth, OR slow as hell.
But if one could get the average speed of the cars passing the point, on the other hand...
Check that: :-)
http://www.transport.ntua.gr/map/
It works for years now, and is very accurate
Here in Holland many of the highways have these sensors in the road, that can tell traffic density. There are a number of websites that provide you with realtime traffic density data. See this picture for an example. This is a JPG which is recreated every 5 minutes or so.
Cheers
Costyn.
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
Freeway? Don't you mean Motorway?
All The Netherlands roads (main roads) already have this system, take a look:
Amsterdam
Before I leave my work I always check it!
Overview of The Netherlands
This plan, although interesting is stuck in the Stone Age. Use GPS transmitters to monitor density. Sure it would require fitting vehicles with a unit but eliminating the cost of expensive sensors and helicopter time could really balance things out. Has anyone done any research in this area?
And on a side note...
I've always wondered why with cheep GPS availability the ever encroaching government doesn't just monitor speeds and mileage from in the car. I know Oregon was thinking about a mileage counter with GPS systems but there was no mention of speed tracking. I am not an advocate of such a thing, privacy is a good thing, but there is no doubt that if drivers know they will get caught the roads would be a safer place.
you can find it here
Copenhagen (Denmark) has that already, but I don't know anybody that uses it. Your plan for the day is made the day before - when you set your alarm clock. When you've eaten breakfast you drive to work. You don't turn on your PC to check the traffic - that wouldn't get you faster to work.
Once you're on the road, traffic radio takes care of redirections in case of special problems, and even though they use sensors today instead of helicopter - who cares?
Last week the sensor system was down btw, so they asked people to phone in with their mobile phones, and the information given in the radio based on those phoners was very good - if not better than when they use the sensors, simply because the cause for problems was included in the messages.
Dybdahl.
The Atlanta area has had something similar for awhile. It's pretty handy if you want to check traffic on your way home.
Plus, you can modify the map to display the locations of traffic cameras around the area. When you click a camera, it shows you the current view from that camera.
It's a pretty nifty system.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
People in Denver are probably like the old cartoon dinosaur: pretty outdated.
Like a million other fellow Europeans, I'll point out my favourite service, opened for over half a decade now: http://www.sytadin.tm.fr/. This stuff is also linked to the information the FM stations relay, and more importantly to the variable message displays (one every 500m, on the Périphérique, the inner ring you see out there). There are displays to this map at every major subterranean parking place in business centres (La Défense etc.). Years ago, one company was broadcasting it into a display embedded into the (passenger's, duh!) sun shield.
(in fact, I had this very GIF in my slashbox in... say...1999? Hemos, you can really wear cowboyneal's donkey helm today).
What's important is that today, this stuff is refined to the point they're able to accurately tell you how accurate they are. And they are.
And of course, today, you can access this on i-Mode phones (those from Bouygues), and you can bet the UMTS offers will trumpet it like it's legal marijuana... uh, when they are ready to roll, that is.
(by the way, the Detroit (Michigan) VMD system pretty sucks; from my limited experience with it, times are accurate at an order of magnitude, no better (ie, if it says 5 minutes, you're going to be anywhere in the 2-30 minutes range or almost... if you can dodge the potholes, that is). I hope for the Denver folks that the outdated system announced by Hemos works better -- poor tax dollars otherwise).
We've had this in Chicago for some time, and it works quite well.
http://www.ai.eecs.uic.edu/GCM/chicagoland.html
It's a good place to do a quick check before you head out, just to be sure. However, once you're already in your car, I still think nothing beats the radio stations' traffic people telling you how it is.
http://www.dot.state.mn.us/tmc/trafficinfo/map/ref reshmap.html
Though it seems that only central Minneapolis/St. Paul is working right now.. could it be the mounds of snow?
We have something similar in Connecticut
This is a Java applet that shows average speed of vehicles in the Hartford area.
Don't Tread on Me
"Looks like traffic helicopters will slowly become unnecessary in Denver"
Um yeah, as long as everyone has some form of wireless internet (802.11x + Laptop, cellphone, whatever), that has a battery charge, is turned on, and able to be read while driving. Otherwise the traffic helicopters and radios will still be quite useful.
There's been online traffic monitoring, updated automatically in the Houston TX area for at *least* five years. I believe it was part of an A&M project that just stayed in place.
-- If it ain't broke - overclock it more.
My nav system uses the data collected all over Europe to show me traffic jams and other things that might be handy for me to know while driving. It's been around for years and it's called TMC. In The Netherlands the data for these systems is captured by a similar system as mentioned in the article. It's just that it has been around here for about 5 years, maybe even longer.
beauty is only a light switch away
Such things have existed for years in the US.
Here's Houston: http://traffic.tamu.edu/incmap/
Here's Dallas: http://dfwtraffic.dot.state.tx.us/dfwweb/
These don't use 'car counters' (sounds expensive), they simply use the RFID tags that the tollway system uses to automatically charge you when you cruise through at 70 mph. They just set the sensors up on the side of the road (cheap), and send the info in. That's why they can afford to have coverage over the entire city, not just downtown like that slow Denver map.
What would be great is a standardized system to push these maps to LCD screens in your car.
Why not compare to the actual "road service" web site, which has live cameras in a great number of places, that you can check on the web and see what the weather and traffic is like. In addition, there are also actual "trafic data", which shows "cars per hour" counts as well as "average speed" etc. information.
t -f rame.html
r am e.html
Here (realtime cameras):
http://www.tiehallinto.fi/alk/frames/kelikamera
and here (realtime traffic data):
http://www.tiehallinto.fi/alk/frames/liikenne-f
http://www.infotrafic.com/cartesidf.php?Region=IDF &AC=873773407
D F& AC=873773407
http://www.infotrafic.com/bouchons.php?Region=I
Anyone else have to stare at the url http://www.gotrex.com/ just a second longer than usual wondering if an editor actually put *that* link on the front page :-)
which is pretty-darn-close to realtime. a friend of mine :)
uses this almost as a live tool to tell him when to leave
work for his cross-paris trip home. paris traffic being
what it is, he still ends up parking a lot on the
peripherique, but this helps a bit.
ile-de-france traffic site
The system itself is a good idea, but the distribution of the info needs to be reconsidered.
Talking on the phone while driving already causes enough accidents each year. Now you will have to actually LOOK at your phone and figure out yourself where the traffic jams are. How many more accidents will that cause?
And who actually believes that the traffic report you see online before you leave from home has any relationship to the trafffic by the time you get there? You might very well end up taking an unnecessarily long detour.
Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, they should look at the system in Germany. Each bridge has a radar station on it that monitors the traffic flow below. The data is distributed electronically to radio stations and more importantly to GPS navigation systems. No helicopters, yet still a timely flow of information. Even better are the GPS navigation systems which take this data and plan your route based on up-to-the-second traffic data.
The Information Superhighway is great to drive on, but parking traffic information there should be avoided as much as parking cars on a normal highway.
http://www.sytadin.tm.fr/tempsreel/parisint.gif
http://www.sytadin.tm.fr/
Great time saver, especially with itineraries now being calculated according to the current traffic data.
Having just moved to Minneapolis, I'm thrilled to have real-time traffic congestion online. I wish they'd had this in the Baltimore/D.C. area, but alas, they didn't.
Anyway, this is great, if I'm driving, but what about those of us who take public transportation? There's never any indication of how late something is running.
When I lived in Helsinki, Finland and worked out in Espoo, they had a great system up some places (Tapiola, for instance) that listed the buses coming and how long it'd be until they got there, and sometimes if a bus was delayed, it even had the delay posted.
If you want to bring something traffic-wise from Finland to the U.S., that would be incredibly useful (as would on-time road construction projects).
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
In Los angeles and most of california, caltrans has been doing that for a while. Everyone has been saying "nothing new", but the downside of this is, it's usually driven by demand and bad traffic. I thought telecommuting was suppose to make it so less people need to commute. What happened to the idea of flex hours, to reduce the "rush hour" effect? Me thinks driving culture needs to change. Same with western disposable culture. while we're at it, lets get rid of Dodge Ram and other cars that get 4mils per gallon.
I've been thinking for a while that something like this combined with a combination satellite/digital radio receiver and GPS/map would work wonders at getting people around traffic jams. A lot of high congestion areas in urbanized counties have electronic traffic monitoring, if they'd go the next step and get that data out to everyone, there'd be a real change in the way people commute.
The way I see it digital/satellite radio is next to useless for music, you just get the same crap you find on the FM dial. Digital/satellite radio has a redeeming aspect in the fact it is a digital stream of information. In between packets carrying Britney Spears and Metalica you can stick useful data like say...freeway information. If traffic advisory stations broadcast easily parsed text streams inbetween their [digital] audio broadcasts a smart box in your car could pick out the text and parse it for display.
Since people looking down to read text advisories would end up being the sources of advisories themselves the computer could do the hard work for them. If you break up a particular freeway into arbitrary sections and in your text advisory say "101:57:32 101-405:10" (101 for the freeway, 57 for the 57th mile/section, 32 for the speed in mph and 101-405 for an interchange and 10 for the speed) the computer could change that section of the freeway on your simplified street map to being a dark red. The area you were going 75 on would be a nice bright green. It could even do you one better by figuring out via GPS which mile/section you were on and tell you approximatly how long until you got to the jam and possibly give you alternate surface routes past it. If you wanted it wouldn't be terribly difficult to have the computer just give you a verbal warning and alternate route suggestions.
If you have a decent number of drivers knowing the future road conditions they can be a little more careful when coming to a jam. There'd be less (in an ideal situation) screeching brakes because some jackass is suprised to see a line of tail lights. Also being as this stuff could use digital radio infrastructure which is on its way and not take up much more space or processing power in your card radio it'd be pretty convenient.
Ultimately a reduction in traffic jams is going to mean a reduction in injuries from them and much less environment impact from having half a googlplex of cars on the road. Current traffic advisories do a good job of giving you fair warning as long as you listen to a station that does regular enough advisories for them to be useful. They're also easily clocked out by playing a CD (and thus not listening to the radio). A digital system could play a CD or any radio station and still provide visual or audible warnings gathered from traffic services. It's no solution to traffic problems but in the long run might save a lot of lives, headaches, and gallons of black stuff.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
unsigned int question = 0x2B | ~(0x2B)
Artimis provides both the traffic guys and the general consumer information about current average speeds over many of the highway links. Plus it has many webcams in place so that the user can get a feel for the traffic visually.
Nothing new in France either.
Roads have had sensors for at least a decade.
Used for different purposes
- traffic monitoring (accidents, etc.)
- driver information by huge screens on the road, telling how long to this and this direction ; and I find it really nerve calming to know how long it will take and be able to organize (once it only said how long - in distance - the congestion is, which I don't care about)
- website for 4 years.
Here we have two type of sensors
- simple loops, which only give information about the "coverage rate" (that is, proportion of time there is a vehicle on the loop. Funnily, this figure is heavily correlated with the state of traffic and the speed of the vehicles. 0.1 is heavy traffic and 0.2 is congestion. I do not recall exacly the figures but you get the highest throughput for a magic "coverage rate" which corresponds to around 57 kmph (~37 mph).
- double loops are simple loops 1 meter away ; correlating data from the two gives you the time decay between them and so the speed of vehicles, in a more reliable fashion than just simple loops ; in particular with these you can ajust the nominal traffic model with observed speeds so your model integrates real road conditions (snow, rain, saturday night...) and single loops can then give you very accurate information.
On heavily trafficked roads (eg Boulevard Peripherique in Paris) you have a single loop every 400m and a double every 2km AFAIR.
Transguide
Transguide is San Antonio's answer to the same problem. Be sure to check out the cameras. Once in awhile you get lucky and catch a flaming car or an 18-wheeler on its side.
They also transmit the camera video on a local low power station that's carried on the cable. Full motion video of wrecks? You bet!
If I can just get the internet in my car, I can make use of this.... and then I'll find out that there's a traffic jam being caused by some idiot motorist trying to use a laptop to check traffic reports. D'oh!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
We've had the traffic mapping info for a long time Here!
-- dieman - Scott Dier
The Gary-Chicago-Milwaukee corridor has had real-time reporting for years now. It covers the major interstates in and around Chicago.
Houston has one as well. This one works by passively reading the identifications off those handy little tollway ez-tags, and sees how fast the traffic is moving on average. I always thought it was kind of funny how it would often read 70 mph in places even though the speed limit was 55. The map looks pretty crappy like now. This is typical rush hour. I used to take 45 minutes to get to school, (8 mi. trip) worst case was an hour and a half. Stupid Houston, yay college.
Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Never posted so excuse any faux pas.
s s/camera/camhome.htm)
)
I've been watching the Toronto Highway system for a few years now. I'm not sure when they went live but the Ontario Governments Ministry of Trabsportation has made their cameras accessible to the public when I head they revamped their web site. (http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/traveller/compa
Even the Weather Network here in Canada has a feed you can access. (http://www.theweathernetwork.com/camera/toronto/
It is very precise, as not only are the microwave oscillators very stable, and the speed of light itself is very constant.
If you find yourself near a microwave doppler supermarket-type door opener that has the mixer-out indicator visible, you can see the indicator dim and brighten as you cross wavefronts in the microwave beam, meaning the phase of the waves reflected from you arrive back in time to either aid or oppose the oscillator transmitting the microwave energy.
There is a lot of cool stuff you can do with microwaves. They are really bouncy things.. they bounce off of darned near anything conductive.. and deriving the doppler is as simple as using a plain junction diode which is exposed to both the transmit and receive side of the microwave beam.. the multiplication of "local oscillator" and "RF" occurs at the diode itself and the resulting "IF" will be in the low audio region ( for human velocities anyway ) and quite easily processed by simple amplifiers.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Next the cars will be identified, not just counted..
Then pedestrians will be counted.. then tracked by 'national ID number'.
Wake up people. its al part of a slow progression to gain acceptance of constant monitoring of all activities of the citizens..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Same Old Story, just no flash:
http://www.caltrans.ca.gov/sdtraffic
I live in this congested city, and although the real-time map is cool, the fact that they link the data collectors to the on-ramps is fucking awful.
Many times during rush-hour, I have seen traffic backed up for a mile or more trying to get on a relatively fast moving highway because a data collector isn't seeing any moving traffic for some unknown reason.
After a while people get the idea and just drive through the light, but you still get the occasional asshat who sits there for the ten minutes it takes to change.
Sometimes technology just can't integrate with old processes efficiently.
- Barrie
There is no need to be stuck in any traffic on this planet anymore, now that I have the URLs of all traffic-websites in the world. Oh, by the way, we had this for years where I live too. I wouldn't want to be left behind.
This has already been done down here in Hampton Roads.... Just becuase a big city has done it makes headlines....WTF??
mod me up, mod me down
this is my sig
I used to use a traffic master YQ fitted to a pool car at previous company, it featured an LCD map of the road network, showing hot spots and hold up and average traffic speeds, it covered the major for the whole of the uk. You pretty quickly learn about hot spots to avoid, whilst it may not particularly improve journey time, it does really reduce the stress of sitting in a traffic jam.
Here is the manditory link: http://www.trafficmaster.co.uk/
Philadelphia, Traffic.com has this as well. And I can get to at least the non-graphical keyroute summary from my t-mobile sidekick as well.
/. right now for jamming their online traffic info ...
By the way, I'm sure Motorists in Denver are just loving
why is this article here? is this really "news" to anybody?
seems like the slashdot editors are easily impressed by decades-old technology.
It seems that Speer Boulevard has been slashdotted. I knew I should have caught the bus.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
To know that i don't want to wake up and go into work :-P
--JonnyBlog
Another device to play with while driving a car. I hope this is being touted as a way of checking traffic before you leave the house, not something to do while approaching a traffic jam. Nothing like surfing the web on your phone while driving at lethal speeds. Being an emergency medical technician, I've seen enough of those to never answer a phone while driving.
Ditto here in the UK, we have been using this system for at least three years.
Trafficmaster
This data feeds most of the radio, TV, PDA, satnav and breakdown agency traffic reports. You can view live reports here:
Royal Automobile Club
Automobile Association
A network of cameras, which look like blue lampposts on trunk roads (highways) and fly-swatters on motorway bridges (interstates) digitally capture registration numbers (licence plates) and time how long it takes to get from A to B, or A to C etc. If a significant portion of numberplates arrive at A but don't arrive at B or C, then the computer presumes that there is a blockage somewhere near A. It also uses averaging to spot changes in normal traffic flow which indicate delays rather than blockages.
Interestingly, the trunk road system can be easily socially hacked with very major results. There are many classic cases of Trafficmaster being confused by temporary major changes in traffic flow, particularly infrequent events such as village fetes, town picnic days, jousting re-enactments, fireworks etc. If a bunch of cars all go past camera A and then turn off to park in a field for two hours to watch fireworks, the system will flag up point A as a traffic blockage!
I've known some mischevious parish council members specifically plan their event parking arrangements around buggering up Trafficmaster, making sure that the parking entrance is *after* the blue lamp camera... :-)
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
WSDOT does this for the Puget Sound region as well as highway web cams all across the state.
Did they really mean to sound state-of-the-art by assuming the name of a dinosaur?
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
As other eareas also have this, so does SLC, Utah:
http://commuterlink.utah.gov/nav.htm
tora
I don't think it is from sensors but from Caltrans info...
http://www.sfbaytraffic.info
Handy for me!
In Nashville, we have 16 webcams set up so that we can just look at the roads for ourselves. I'm not going to tell you the link because I don't want them to get slashdotted.
MDC
Do you have ESP?
Sigalert.com will even page you with incidents along your route.
After living in the MD/DC area for a year and a half and trying different driving strategies, I've come to the conclusion that this analog information is rather useless and the only thing that effects my driving habits is one digital piece of information--has the interstate been closed for some reason because crawling along at 10 MPH is still faster then any other choice I have.
For those who don't know, Bill Gates and Paul Allen made a traffic metering device back in the day, and they were pretty successful at selling it too.
No reason it couldn't be used today, is there?
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
I don't suppose the road sensors will be able to tell you about accidents, when lanes are blocked, how long it will be to clear accidents, whether there are chemical or debris spills on the roadway, and so on?
...and the data is available from many sites.
With my cellphone in one hand and my laptop in the other? ;)
How else will I be able to watch those high-speed pursuits? It always makes my day when some fool drives around like he can get away from a squadron of police and news copters.
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
Preach on, brother!
(with just one tiny quibble with this time thingy: it's a wonderful excuse for grabbing the cell phone and telling how long you'll be late. Of course this is illegal -- but who cares? ;-) )
(thanks for the detailed sensor info, BTW)
http://traffic.tann.net/ (mostly CA)
http://www.sigalert.com (CA)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
showing color-coded levels of congestion on major highways. This handy thing has been in place for several years and I check it EVERY time I leave work.
We've had this in the phoenix area for quite a while now. It isn't fully implemented on all of our freeways, but ADOT (Arizona Dept. of Trans.) is working on upgrading the roadways to have sensors embedded in them (and running fiber along them all!) and wiring up dynamic road signs for traffic warnings. http://www.superstitionfreeway.com/webcam
This already exists in Phoenix. The main highways are monitored, and there are cameras at each main intersection with the highway, as well as incident reports online. You can check out a working version at http://www.azfms.com/Travel/freeway.html . Nobody really uses it or knows about it though. You can also check the cameras for the intersections on the web, or get a live streaming view of the flow of traffic (currently down).
"Light or No congestion has been reported for this location with an average speed of 65 mph."
San Antonio and Detroit were the first two cities in the US to install this type of system. Both of these cities now have extensive networks of sensors on their highways, although I think that San Antonio is much further along in the project. (Launched first in the country.)
There is real-time web traffic data, and signs/cameras/sensors all over the cities huge network of highways, and many major streets, as well. Great idea, but old news, even in the US...
http://azfms.com/Travel/freeway.html
Houston's real time traffic map
Hmm, depends if I want to get paid.
And with sound effects! It's also much easier to add new roads using their interface. Maybe the Denver DOT should check it out.
John McNair
This is old news where I'm from, the company that makes the in-road traffic data system is headquartered here; they have US offices as well.
x .h tm
International Road Dynamics (IRD) has been installing these systems worldwide for over 20 years. They are a spin-off firm based on research at the University of Saskatchewan during the late 1970-early 1980's.
They also make the systems that incorporate GPS to track transport truck & trailers in realtime.
They have a competitor based in Europe (Germany, I think, but don't quote me) which does similar things across the pond.
Here's a news release page; you'll get the idea of exactly how common these sytems are, in general, as well as the various types of systems that can be installed and the various applications for the data generated.
http://www.irdinc.com/english/html/ir/news/inde
You may have to fix the link, I can't seem to properly display the end where it shows as h[space]tm instead of htm
As far as the readers used to charge tolls at speed, again this is old news and like IRD, is based in Canada (in this case, Vancouver, although I don't recall the company's name. I do know they installed the Illinois system many years ago).
it won't stop the helicopters, they are tools for the TV and radio stations to out-glitz each other, and the current climate, in Denver at least, is not for the stations to care at all about helicopter noise, since their advertisers target the undisquieted suburban market.. even if it works, they'll still regularly fly directly over my home to the more central part of the highway where a rebuild (and thus traffic sensors) is about a decade away
...
and this is without mentioning the more important issues, for which traffic-management technology is a mere palliative: the selfish behavior and ignorance of many drivers, the decades-old mistake of building highways through neighborhoods and riparian zones, the refusal of leaders to deal with sprawl
i also lived in Minneapolis, where a much more comprehensive system than Denver's did nothing to alleviate aggressive and clumsy driving, which causes many accidents and slowdowns.. and now in Denver, with TRex just south of me, the alternate routes "smart" drivers take mean i live with lots of vehicles cutting through my central residential neighborhood
so who cares if Denver uses some nothing-new technology to sugar coat another feeder tube for the cancer of sprawl?
There is absolutely nothing new here. My last job was working on a system similar to this in Australia which has been running in various stages of development for at least 30 years now (the original implementation was on a HP-1000 minicomputer). From changing the signal timing on surface streets dependant on traffic flow to adjusting ramp metering to provide the optimal flow of traffic on a freeway to predicting and displaying the time the next busses are due at a stop - it's been done and works damn well.
Honestly, it's about time the US caught up with the rest of the world in traffic management.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Utah Commuter Link, Salt Lake City and surrounding area
So do they have a way to correlate this with traffic light data, so that, for instance, they would be able to tell if someone ran a red light and caused an accident? I know they probably would not be able to tell WHICH car did it, but it would be nice if they could tell that A car coming from THIS direction ran a red light at approximately the time of an accident.
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Houston Transtar does traffic monitoring, as well. They use the signals from EZTags (you know, those things you stick on your window that automatically pay a toll for you on toll roads) to measure aggregate traffic speed, and then display it all on a nifty, color-coded map. Accidents get notated with little "!" marks and you can see information on lane closures. They also have histograms available, so you can see what the average speed at any given time of day is supposed to be, and live views from the traffic-monitoring cameras all over the city. Check it out.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
As mentioned above, Denver is behind the curve on this type of system.
;-).
Heck, in Los Angeles, we even have such a system for city streets.
But the idea that it will really help with congestion is pretty much a pipe dream. Congestion happens because of something called latent demand -- there's always more people who *want* to be driving than there are actually out on the road. Therefore, for everyone who leaves the road because it's "too congested," someone else joins because now, it's at an acceptable level for them. This is also why increasing road capacity has no long-term effect on congestion. It's simply not feasible to provide enough road to meet demand, because when you think you have, you find out there's more demand.
However, if we get a really coherent system that can predict your travel time on a route, and at the same time have dedicated bus lanes and report the bus travel time for the same trip... maybe we actually can do a little something
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
San Antonio's Transguide is probably the best of any of these systems. Much of the city's infrastructure is covered, the signs are accurate, provide travel times, and are posted everywhere.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
In the L.A. area, check out the free TrafficDodger, which has been around for some time now. I used to go to school/work where it was developed: it's got some nice AI search algorithms.
Yep, the system in Seattle is great! They also reports wrecks within minutes after they happen, and show events (sports, etc) that will muck things up.
It is even more useful when you can access it on the go. If you have a WAP cell, point at:
http://manoli.net/traffic/
Transcodes the traffic data into text -- select a freeway & direction, get average MPH at each overpass / exit where it isn't wide open.
BTW, not my site, found it googling.
Through ISTEA (intermodal surface transport efficiency act) and NEXTEA (same thing, only longer & more $$$) the federal gov't has been paying for this for over 15 years now. The pilot was the GCM (Chicagoland (gary-chi-milwaukee)) area.
Seems anything can get posted as new technology these days.
My TV newsman tells me about traffic. And I can actually see the real cars!!!
(Check out the differences in implementation. Slashdot readers should be a little more savvy than these comments suggest.)
I have only been to San Antonio once, but IIRC they had an "estimated time to exit X" display on the highway signs. Traffic information just couldn't be any more relevant and useful than that.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
LA has had traffic online for a long time:? Region=Greater+Los +Angeles
Freeways:
http://www.sigalert.com/map.asp
Surface Streets:
http://trafficinfo.lacity.org/
The pitcure of impending doom cause by /. would be a sight to show your children!
Traff-o-data was a good idea after all.
Litigious bastards
Now, if we only had a site to monitor the traffic on that traffic site.
Sigh. Here's the link that Limited Vision wanted you to cut and paste, thus removing the whole point of the world-wide web.
(His name is frighteningly accurate.)
Seattle traffic. Been there forever; there's a Windows exe traffic-viewer too.
This is not news, unless you live in Denver. Browse sigalert.com, especially the Greater Los Angeles region. There are so many data points that it's hard to hover over any particular one for extended data. One little bubble on that map is less than one mile "wide", and they'restacked on top of each other.
/.
This announcement is of purely regional interest and doesn't seem suited for
on one of the busiest crossroads in Paris (St Germain / St Michel) they had put an automated camera for a while, shooting whenever a car ran a red light. I've seen pretty neat accident pictures ;-), but can't find any on the web.
O.