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MS Clearflow To Help Drivers Avoid Traffic Jams
Pioneer Woman writes "Microsoft announced plans to introduce a Web-based service for driving directions that incorporates complex software models to help users avoid traffic jams. The system is intended to reflect the complex traffic interactions that occur as traffic backs up on freeways and spills over onto city streets and will be freely available as part of the company's Live.com site for 72 cities in the US. Microsoft researchers designed algorithms that modeled traffic behavior by collecting trip data from Microsoft employees who volunteered to carry GPS units in their cars. In the end they were able to build a model for predicting traffic based on four years of data, effectively creating individual 'personalities' for over 800,000 road segments in the Seattle region. In all the system tracks about 60 million road segments in the US."
This sounds like a sensible idea but if it becomes widespread then the metrics it has used for it's monitoring of the traffic conditions are going to change as people choose new routes based on it's suggestions with the upshot that previously clear routes are now congested.
My own journey to work changes based on the time I leave the house and my local knowledge of the area and problme junctions so I can normally make my way down side streets and 'rat runs' without encountering much traffic. The last thing I want is for anyone else to be told these routes and start to clog them up. It is amazing though the difference it can make if you take what is in theory a slightly longer route to get around stupidly placed roundabouts or congested main roads.
I guess ultimately if people had a perfect knowledge of the traffic situation the congestion would even out so everywhere is just congested at rush hour rather than extremely congested but the basic problem, in the UK at least, is that there just aren't enough roads. Here in Birmingham during the recent building work in the city centre there were some traffic conditions which would just lead inevitably to total gridlock as jams backed up across islands causing more jams which looped all the way around town to hold up the traffic in the original jam even more. We just need more roads.
Before Microsoft ever even did BASIC, Gates and Co had an abortive project called Traf-o-Data, which was somehow to help city planners with traffic management. Now Microsoft has come full circle. I wonder what's next.. after hearing so much about C# as the language of the future, are we going to get a big deal of BASIC?
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