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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/
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
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.
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?
"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.
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
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.
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.
Yeah, the ***creepy*** thing about Houston's system is the way they calculate the speed of traffic flow. The toll system has a little gadget called EZ-TAG that lets you zip through the toll plazas without even slowing down. It has a little radio transmitter that talks to a reciever in the plaza. The traffic monitoring system has checkpoints that monitor these, and since it can uniquely identify you, it knows your average speed for that segment. They ***say*** that they won't ever use it against you (ie to write speeding tickets) but if they ever start, if will be back to coins for me. Or at the very least, a special RF blocking case to protect me from the eye in the sky...
the parent post was probably right, given that the link is:
http://traffic.tamu.edu/incmap/incmap.aspx
JDR
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.
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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]
Yup - they also have some traffic cameras that issue spead tickets that way here too. Most Speed cameras are still the old radar trap ones, but there is also the SPECS system which uses your average speed. There are some in Nottingham, and I wouldnt have known unless I had been in my Bosses car - he has widget with a database of all known speed cameras linked up to a GPS antenna, so his car tells him if he needs to slow down. Immoral but clever.
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
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
...and the data is available from many sites.
You assume the sensor is "dead," but these traffic management systems set ramp meters based on conditions further down the road. Traffic may be rushing towards a stop. Minneapolis-St. Paul has had these sensors and ramp meters for years now. One of State Senators got a bug up his backside about them and forced MnDOT to do a "study" (well, it was a real study) that involved shutting down all the ramp meters for weeks. The results? A disaster. Congestion increased severly on most roads. Most trips *increased* in drive time (yes, even when you include time spent being an "asshat" at a ramp meter).
The interesting thing was that this was not 100% true. Some routes got better. And drive times improved over the course of the study, although they didn't come back to anywhere near as good (on average) as they were before metering. In other words, people found alternate routes.
One outcome of this was the appearence of lighted arrow signs along side streets of the most congested highways that come on to point motorists on to alternate routes when congestion is severe. Unlike the ramp meters, these are mere suggestions. But it seems to have improved things.
Transit is a huge political issue here. The Republicans took over Minnesota government last election largely by promising massive road building instead of public transit. That's pretty remarkable for MN which has long been considered a Democratic stronghold. People get "het up" about traffic.
Traffic metering WORKS. Sure, you get annoyed waiting on the ramps, but they really do improve travel time.
Oh yeah, the study did improve their meter rates. They were able to speed some meters up and slow some others down and *improve* travel times over the pre-study metering system. It didn't stop me cursing that senator every time I commuted during the study! BTW, in 2001, when the study was done, there were 233 metered ramps in the metro area during the morning rush, and 283 metered ramps in the afternoon rush. I don't really know how many meters exist now, although MnDOT's web site could probably tell you. They have data on the study and its aftermath on their web site.
"Light or No congestion has been reported for this location with an average speed of 65 mph."
Houston's real time traffic map
Hmm, depends if I want to get paid.
Each of the metering lights in the Twin Cities are uniquely preset with three metering rates: light, medium and heavy. This means that one on-ramp might release cars every two seconds in light, fast-moving traffic conditions; but the next ramp down the same stretch of freeway might be releasing cars only once every four seconds in the same conditions.
Also, the DOT is easily able to identify misfiring sensors. On their old web page, you could see that they had "greyed out" the failed sensors.
What this means is that a single metering light won't just decide to sit there for 10 minutes if a glitch happens. It might switch to its "heavy" setting, but it won't take ten minutes to change.
Finally, as an aside, around here running a ramp meter light carries the exact same penalty as running a red light at any intersection. Moving violation, $80 fine, 3 points, the whole nine yards. I won't do it. Ten minutes seems really excessive, though. If you have to wait 10 minutes for a light to change, call your highway department and report a broken signal. They should fix it.
John
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
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.
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....