Yahoo! Maps to Support Realtime Traffic

squidfrog writes "Yahoo is set to support realtime traffic overlays for its existing Yahoo! Maps program. 'Yahoo's dynamic maps draw on real-time traffic information from metropolitan transportation departments and private providers, including embedded road sensors, traffic cameras, police scanners, and traffic helicopters. Yahoo declined to identify the exact sources of its traffic data... Roadways are colored green, yellow and red, to highlight the normal movement of traffic, minor delays or severe road congestion. A user can hover over a stretch of road to view details of impediments.'"

Comments

Another way NOT to know the traffic.

[tonsofpcs]

The local radio can't even get the traffic patterns right, what makes Yahoo! think they can do better?

Re:Another way NOT to know the traffic.

[lheal]

>local radio

It's a start, but it will take them a while to get it debugged.

Yahoo and other services do a good job with sporting events, taking the AP, NFL/MLB/NBA and other feeds and using Java apps to turn that into dynamic box scores.

This will be no different.

One thing is that it could prove hugely profitable for Yahoo. According to CNNMoney, they plan to make it available for free, to distinguish themselves from Google. They may offer it as a premium service aimed at portable devices, but I think their first deliverable ought to be a nice app for those local radio stations.

Seattle has had something like this for ages

[breser]

http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/seattle/

and you can even get it on mobile devices:
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/seattle/products/

declined because...?

[SuperBanana]

Yahoo declined to identify the exact sources of its traffic data

I'm going to bet it's because some company is getting data from all the sensors and "traffic center" infrastructure we paid for.

I seriously doubt they have to pay anything for it aside from maybe the cost of a leased line...and I doubt Yahoo gets it for free from said company. Someone's making a lot of bucks off equipment and staff we pay for...even assuming costs for processing the data.

Interestingly, I was just driving down Route 3 here in MA, and noticed that they finally had finished most of the construction for widening the road. Also installed- cameras. The tilt-pan-zoom kind. About every mile or so. In between, or sometimes on the same pole, some sort of antenna box pointed at the road, probably to sense how fast cars are moving by.

Someone want to explain to me how a camera reduces traffic? Considering they have no dynamic ways to alter traffic patterns, seems like a royal fucking waste of money and something bound to be abused.

Re:declined because...?

[MichaelSmith]

Someone want to explain to me how a camera reduces traffic?

The main reason is so they can take a look if there is crash requiring the attendance of emergency services and repair crews.

In the normal course of events there would be an automated incident detection system, using online traffic flow data from vehicle detector loops under the road surface, which tells traffic controllers that there is a problem at a particular location

The camera would be used to quickly book ambulances, fire trucks, etc, if they appeared they may be required. This kind of system can save lives by knocking 10 or 20 minutes off the time required to get people to the site of the accident

Already Available...?

[sam5550]

I would imagine that this service is already available elsewhere. Googling "traffic conditions" with various city names usually turns up decent results.

Many major metropolitan areas have government agencies devoted to controlling traffic; their websites might also be a good place to look.

What I really want...

[Fratz]

is to make use of historical traffic flow data to plan out a route based on start time. This is mostly only valuable for out-of-town travelers, but I'm sure everyone's had one of those experiences where they figured 3:00PM was early enough to be driving near, say, NYC, to avoid rush hour.

I want my navigation system to adjust to unforeseen (realtime) traffic data and re-route me when appropriate, but the most important thing is for it to calculate an effective top speed for each potential road along the path, based on their historical flow data on various days of the week, holidays, and at various times of day. That way, it may realize that a 35MPH side-road that parallels the highway is actually faster than the 65MPH highway at 4:00PM on days when there's some sporting event going on. Prevents me from having to know this stuff :)

Yes, I still want to actually drive the car, thank you very much :)

About time.

[evilviper]

I have a hard time believing how slowly online maps are progressing.

I don't care about traffic info, I can get that myself, elsewhere, but online maps don't even ALLOW you to request an alternate route. You have time and distance to choose from, and that's all.

While I'm complaining, let's talk about the weather channel's web-site. They show you the weather over the major freeways in the country, but it is horrendous at predicting anything. It simply takes today's weather, and assumes everything will be less severe every day after... It's perfectly consistent in this behavior, even when their own forecast know, a week in advance, that the weather is actually going to get worse.

And radio stations are no better. All the "highway stations" tell you a little bit about traffic if you tune-in at the right time, but never anything about bad weather. I was driving directly into the path of a 300mile blizzard, and I didn't have a clue. Even after there was a massive accident that completely blocked the freeway, none of the new media reported (or knew) about it until the next day.

It seems like everything we have in-place is completely impotent. It's even that forecasts are bad, it's that all the information that is well-known is kept isolated, and only provided to the people that need to know about it the MOST, after everything is over.

These are all VERY, VERY simple and easy things, yet nobody has bothered to do it. I think this is clearly an indication of what happens when media outlets are consolidated, reduced to doing nothing but imitating the competition, etc.

My route to work...

[XplosiveX]

I have taken the source of the traffic images from my local transportation website and hosted them on a page so I don't have to click on each section of the map. Saves me a lot of time. I know many people do this. Feel free to use this webpage I have setup if you take the Don Valley Parkway, Gardiner, and QEW. Also the traffic flow map located at the top of that website is handy.

http://3dnewsnet.com/drive.htm

First they need to get the maps right!!

[the_rajah]

Mapquest is worse than Yahoo, but they both are years out of date for the roads in my neighborhood and both are useless in giving directions to our house. A railroad that was taken out some ten years ago and converted to a bike path is still on Mapquest. Both maps show a road that has been closed and don't have a new road that replaces it hundreds of yards away.

Last year I was scanning Popular Science and saw an ad for a Garmin GPS with a street map on the color display. Lo and behold, it was centered on my house, but it was screwed up as I related above. We wrote to them and told them that if they really used that map, people would be getting lost in my area if they used their unit since that road isn't there any more and, oh, about that railroad.. They replied that they'd be in contact with their map source (Looks like Mapquest) and would be sure to get it corrected... Over a year later, it's still inaccurate.

I can understand that it's a huge task to keep things like that updated, but when you get information handed to you about inaccurace, you'd think it'd get fixed within a few months.

"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain

Re:First they need to get the maps right!!

[digitalsushi]

gps companies like gtk and teleatlas and many others all have giant workcenters for data pluggers -- they just sit there with lists of nodes to verify. they have to use multiple souces to update an error. it's no surprise with the amount of red tape involved with getting a correction done that the updates are delayed.

This is VERY cool

[EvilStein]

I noticed this a few days ago and it's been GREAT so far.

Uh, it doesn't suggest alternate routes, though. So I see "Hmm, Hwy 880 is, as usual, fucked." but can find no way around it.

On the bright side, the "Show local Starbucks" works.. I can sit around and wait out the traffic. :)

Real time traffic sensors on the road, thats how

[Ars-Fartsica]

In California, many of the highways are already "wired" - they can in fact tell you in real time how traffic is flowing in certain areas, and this info is available to the public.