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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."
Does KD use Microsoft Spell-cheque?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Traffic James *IS* a dick.
That Traffic James is a total dick. Constantly swerving between lanes and cutting people off. The faster they get him off the roads the better we'll all be.
(Headline currently reads "MS Clearflow To Help Drivers Avoid Traffic James" - hope they fix that...)
=Smidge=
I really hate Traffic James... they're everywhere. I mean, how can one man be in so many places at once? Santa's being given a run for his money... And yes, if the title gets edited, it really was "MS Clearflow To Help Drivers Avoid Traffic James"
haha .. just made my morning :) thx for the post.
Damn, I was hoping to meet 007 in the street one day.
Now we have traffic james, offramps, city streets on the Internet. Do we have playground zones, back alleys, sidewalks? Oh probably. And will these traffic jams be faster than the speed of light from the tip of a finger to the knuckle or will speed be measured in how fast a VW Bug can drive the Internet to the Library of Congress?
Let the Bad Analogies begin.
TDz.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
Do you suppose at any point during the development of this, someone somewhere at MS thought to shout "KICK OUT THE JAMS, MICROSOFTERS!" at the top of their lungs?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I have a way to help stop traffic jams without fancy algorithms: stop tailgating the person in front of you. That way every time that person slows down slightly you don't have to slam on your brakes, thus requiring people behind you to slam on theirs causing a buildup of cars that aren't going anywhere even if traffic isn't that heavy.
I guess they decided to take phrases "computer crash" and "blue screen of death" seriously.
I could only imagine the program modifying GPS directions on the fly:
- Left turn ahead.
- Traffic ahead.
- Please turn right and over the railing
- Please fall 200 feet to the road below and proceed west on highway 53.
Microsoft's Cleartype technology makes text more blurry. So what can we expect from Microsoft's Clearflow?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
... it gives a whole new meaning to the word "crash"!
Both probably couldn't give me directions to the nearest hooker.
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
I imagine the following message: "Traffic jam reported. Please press CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot device!"
;-)
And also the slogan "where do you want to go to day" gets a very new meaning
Sometimes it just feels like people are conspiring to avoid me, finally I've got some proof!
See, the highways are like a series of tubes...
Blank until
the blue map of death?
If people can get past, can they get future? Best way to confuse a stoner
He's a dick.
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.
They are making assumptions that Trafic Jams around the world/US is the same as Near Redomnd WA. I know traffic in my area on i90/i87 is actually fairly good except for when there is a car accident and often the traffic occures before it can get reported. But down in CT. on i84 and i91 Traffic is always heavy and traffic jams are just from to many cars on the road. Vs. accedents. Also some states have commuter lanes so there may be heavy traffic on the road but you have a couple of poeple in your car so you can take the commuter lane and avoid trafic all togeter. Traffic Patterns varry differently across the country. Just collecting data from people who live in a particular areas may not get good information to make the decision.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Traffic is backing up 10 miles after a driver crashed reading Live.com when he should have been paying attention to the road
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
Hmm well I have used Google maps on my pda and Microsoft live on my pda also and personally i trust the Microsoft version better. For some reason the Google version thinks performing a U turn is a smart thing to do in a busy city. Try it some time, use Google maps to get to directions and 6 out of 10 times it will tell you to do a U turn and then try the same directions with Microsoft and it will not ask you to do a U turn.
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
Some cop with a pink mohawk?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I'd rather not trust suggestions by Microsoft software ("Hi, I see you're trying to drive to work!..."), particularly those which are based upon the decisions made by Microsoft employees. We've had too much experience with the results of their decisions.
You are about to fall 200 feet to a road below.[Cancel] [Allow]
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Imagine the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applied on a macro scale!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The first thing I thought, and I have thought the idea of analyzing traffic flow on a wide scale could give the individual an edge, as soon as the masses know the way around traffic, the jam will just move. So unless this algorithm can automatically figure out where traffic is stuck, and route the users in many different ways, this will eventually not work. Not to mention that in many cases (ie try entering downtown toronto from etobicoke), there are only so many ways to go. In my example you have some side streets, bloor, eglington, gardiner, lake shore. But they all suck, and if you suggest the small residential roads, you'll probably sit just as long waiting to turn from road to road. I've tried. But if it helps at all its worth it imho, its not my money!
missing one
-take as many toll roads to pay for this program
If people can get past, can they get future? Best way to confuse a stoner
Aye, 'tis been a while since I heard the name of the Hound of the Highway, Traffic James.
Jim Axelman was once an ordinary man. He had a wife, three kids, even a Labrador retriever named Buddy. But his life was changed forever as he drove to work on fateful day. You see, he was trying to change lanes while talking on his cell phone and jamming out to some Led Zeppelin playing on the classic cock station when he unfortunately cut off a Gypsy minivan-mom. The Gypsy, being a member of the same PTA as Jim, knew who he was and cursed his name to the Heavens. Since that day, he's been forced to drive the streets.
His blinkers never work. If you're in a hurry, he slows you down. If you're not rushed, he tailgates. He can't stop for food or bathroom breaks, his odometer never changes. He forever wanders the Earth in his dark blue Geo Metro.
It's been said that some nights, on an empty country road.... you can still hear the a never-ending play of Kashmir on the wind.
More precisely: Too many cars at a given time.
There are several ways to solve this problem:
1) build more efficient roads, i.e. better traffic control, better lane design, better/fewer intersections, better signs, etc.
2) build more roads, but only up to a point
3) reduce the number of cars on the road at peak times
3a) reduce the number of cars
3b) spread the load out over time
Mass transit and congestion taxes are ways to do 3a. Getting employers and schools to shift work times is a way to do 3b.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Here in DC, when the beltway is backed up, so is everything else. No amount of directions will solve the problem, there are too many cars and too few roads.
I have the Navigon 7100 which gets traffic updates, and durring rush hour(s) there is no way out of it, everything goes red.
If M$ could prevent the traffic jams within Vista....
I'm not a human, but I play one on T.V.
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?
This is my sig.
Let's add telecommuting in there. There's nothing about the work I do that requires me to be in the office more than one day a week (aside from the mandate from management). I'm sure many people on the road with me are in the same situation.
We really need custom mods.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
making bad Windows Vista Display Drivers pun.
This service should work great! Traffic jams are caused by bad drivers and we know the people at Microsoft are experts with those.
post'em if you got'em.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
but trafficjames.com is available to registar (please do it before microsoft does). whoever registers it better remember this article.
If people can get past, can they get future? Best way to confuse a stoner
Is the system general enough to help me avoid Rick James...bitch?
chicago and new york city fare pretty well, but most sprawling american cities have awful rail service. they were built from the ground up based on road transportation rather than rail. this is not good
east asia and europe has left us in the dust when it comes to rail service . while we spent most of the 20th century ripping up what we built up in the 19th century, other parts of the world remained committed to rail or at least let it limp along on life support. the usa pretty much killed rail: ripped up the lines and buried them under suburban subdivisions
but with gas prices climbing, it should behoove those in positions of power to update, revive, or pioneer rail services in major american cities. it's a matter of economic security nowadays, not an environmentalist's pipe dream. due to fuel concerns, environmental concerns, quality of life concerns (remember, this threadjack is under a story about traffic congestion), i think the 21st century will represent a renaissance in railroads
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It looks like you are trying to drive the wrong way up a one-way-street - would you like help with that ?
Where are the details? I've seen several attempts to use such data, and the way that traffic works, the slow-down is clear by the time it is posted to the Internet, and what shows green is red when you get there. Without a tactical HUD and real time data, such things are little more than novelties.
Everyday I drive past one intersection that has a slow down on good days. When there are traffic problems ahead, you cannot tell until you are in the traffic jam already. Normally, it takes 2-3 minutes and you're moving again. Some days it's merely a slow-down. Traffic analysis will never show when that stretch of road is fully in congestion and the only prudent course is to get off the highway.
I don't even care how many volunteers were in the study, modeling traffic has been done before and it does not predict the daily problems that you have to deal with.
Nothing short of a HUD with real time data will help. Well, voice assistance from a system with real time data will help also, doesn't require a HUD.
The point is that modeling won't do it. Only monitoring in real time will do it. Without real time data, by the time you get to the decision point half the other drivers are already clogging your escape route.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
TomTom, a dutch navigation systems manufacturer, is already equipping their latest systems with this technique, but I haven't heard any reviews or feedback, so I'm not sure if and how it works.
... traffics jams are terrible in the Randstad, the conglomeration of The Hague, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht.
If this works, it could be quite a relief
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
TRAFFIC JAMES CARJACKED ME!
A whopping 120 characters to take your mind off topic. Tested in MS Word.
Lets hope it works better than MapPoint...
And it's not the only time they screw up either.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Birmingham already has the best intersections in the world... That's a city centre you're looking at.
Of course there is the obligatory reference to Spaghetti Junction.
I love this city.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
This morning watching almost a hundred other cars getting zero MPG it occurred to me why Raleigh NC has some of the worst air quality in the nation. You see the traffic lights here are designed to slow things down and to generate lots and lots and LOTS of traffic tickets (We write the same number of tickets as Houston, roughly 7x more people than we have).
And you literally have to plan your trip around avoiding left turns in Raleigh because you could wait a half hour to make one. Either there's no left turn light and the rednecks will happily t-bone you instead of yielding, or, there is a left turn light and it turns green for 30 seconds every ten minutes.
Traffic reports are a complete waste of time. Here's the traffic report for the rest of the Century: Traffic in Raleigh is fucked up.
You are about to hit Traffic James. Avoid, Retry, Fail. > A An unknown error #8493FA54BB18 has occurred.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
Clippy would be perfect for this.
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
"This is embarassing. A good idea showed up in the research lab again. Fortunately not in our main operations where we only copy ideas from competitors. This has to to stop or people might start thinking we are innovative." -BG
Right here, dude! I took a shower this morning though, so maybe you guys can give me a second chance, huh?
Did I ever tell you about the time Traffic James took me out to go get a drink with him? We go off looking for a bar and we can't find one. Finally Traffic takes me to a vacant lot and says, "Here we are." We sat there for a year and a half -- until sure enough, someone constructs a bar around us. Well, the day they opened he ordered a shot, drank it, and then burned the place to the ground. Traffic yelled over the roar of the flames, "Always leave things the way you found 'em!"
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So how are they gonna prevent the daily traffic jam on the Sunset Freeway here in Portland? It's the only freeway that goes west of downtown, from the largest city in Oregon (Portland) to the second largest city in Oregon (Beaverton). How is software going to prevent 30,000 cars from only having one way to go? Among the problems, are a tunnel that goes under a big ass ridge (and can't be expanded), the freeway itself being in a canyon so it can't be expanded without destroying Forest Park, and the downtown terminus being a completely ODOT-botched interchange with 405 that requires you to be in the proper lane a mile in advance, or you're going the wrong way.
Code around that one, cause most of the people driving it have tried every other route possible; and they're just as bad, if not worse:
W. Burnside / NW Barnes Rd.? Two lane tunnel restricting traffic. Lots of traffic signals. Also, the joy of driving on W. Burnside.
NW Lovejoy / NW Cornell? Two lanes, with "traffic calming." Oh, and you get to drive through the Pearl District, and dodge the slow-as-hell Streetcar.
SW Barbur Blvd. / Beaverton Hillsdale Hwy? Well, good luck getting through Hillsdale without tearing your steering wheel off, because the through lane is also the one that Tri-Met stops every 2 blocks in. Oh, and the lights at Scholls Ferry Rd. are always fun to sit at for 20 minutes.
Hi I'm traffic James. It looks like you are trying to turn left. Would you like help?
Badges!?! We don't need no stinking badges!
Stop driving on my lawn, you damn kids!
I actually pay to subscribe to MSN Traffic for my GPS - which, btw, is pretty useless. Don't us paying customers deserve the priority of functioning service first?
If ClearType causes color fringing on your Gateway LCD, have you tried using ClearType Tuner, part of Windows XP PowerToys, to configure ClearType? I know that out of the box, Windows ClearType assumes an RGB LCD panel, but a few LCD panels are BGR, or they have really weird gamma.
Wonder what would they reboot here...don't think traffic is an option... But think if they restart traffic, everyone off the road and come back again LOL
It doesn't consider other modes of transport, like my rocket-powered Breeches of Security.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Something like "-1 Ham-Handed Satire".
-
Ain't an algorithm in the world that can predict, counteract, or eliminate stupid drivers. Math and logic do not apply to human behavior.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
How about:
SLOW THE HELL DOWN, YOU SELF-CENTERED, CLUELESS MORON.
Two things:
- No matter how fast you go, there is some maniac that thinks you are going 5-10 too slow.
- Traffic flow works best when everyone moves at the same speed. Going faster is just as bad, if not worse than going slower.
In the absence of some other method of forming this social contract, I suggest going the fucking speed limit.-
Gates and Co had an abortive project called Traf-o-Data
That was not only the name of the product, it was the original name of Microsoft too.
Up until the 1970s traffic counters recorded the "hits" on their sensors on paper charts. Legions of clerks then counted the dots on the charts by hand in a manner not unlike the infamous Florida recount (looking at "chads" all day). The tallies were then given to "computers" (that was the job title for the person, not a machine in many if not most cases), or statisticians, to figure out if roads were being over-utilised. This service was performed by traffic analysis companies on contract by municipalities.
BillG and Paul Allen thought all this to be ridiculous as electronic computers were being widely adopted in academia and commerce, so they figured they'd save the municipalities tons of money by making a computer with the new Intel 8008 chip. Paul Allen wrote a simulator/development environment for the WSU mainframe, BillG developed the softwqare for the device itself and another friend built the hardware. It wasn't an "abortive" project--the device was completed and they made several thousand dollars using it to provide hourly traffic data to Washington state municipalities.
The reason for Traf-o-data's shortened lifespan was that the Washington state government started taking the paper tapes and feeding them through their own new computers to analyse the traffic at no cost to the municipalities. That quickly put Traf-o-data and several other companies out of the traffic analysis business in Washington state.
Gates and Allen retired the traf-o-data device and went off to college, but their business partnership remained intact. Within months the January 1975 Popular Electronics appeared with the MITS Altair 8800 as the cover story and gave Gates and Allen the opportunity for their next project. Gates and Allen sent a letter to Ed Roberts (MITS founder and Altair designer) offering to supply a BASIC interpreter...IIRC on Traf-o-data letterhead. (story goes that the address and phone number on the traf-o-data letterhead was for the Gates' Seattle-area residence, and when Roberts phoned one of BillG's parents answered and had no clue what this BASIC thing was about; the letter was actually sent from Harvard where BillG and Allen were studying and they forgot to tell BillG's parents about it--but that's just a story, like the one about IBM's men in dark suits showing up at Mrs. Kildall's doorstep). They modified Allen's 8008 simluator to fully support the 8080 procesor of the Altair and set forth writing the BASIC.
After the demo, Roberts hired them (well, Paul Allen at least was an employee) as MITS software development team, and they dropped out and moved to New Mexico to do business near MITS. Their business continued on the side, independent of MITS, and was re-named from Traf-o-data to Micro-soft (the hyphen disappeared when the company converted from a simple partnership into a corporation. They retained rights to supply BASIC to other computer vendors and end users, and then set about creating 6809 and 6502 ports of BASIC. Their BASIC quicky found its way onto IMSAI, ProcTech, Tandy and Commodore computers and the rest is history.
Perhaps BillG was feeling nostalgic about the Traf-o-data system that REALLY started it all for MSFT (not the Altair 8800 or the IBM 5150 as most people might think) and decided to pay homage to "the founder".
We all know this is a car analogy.
It gave me different directions to and from work. I guess this means it's accounting for traffic jams. I did notice that it doesn't ask what time you will be making this journey. In my experience lesser known streets are faster during rush hour, and larger streets and expressways are fastest at off-peak times.
Microsoft also needs to update their maps of Chicago. I-355 goes all the way to I-80 now. I thought it took Google a long time to fix that. Wow!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I've always thought that traffic is basically one massive game of Prisoner's Delimma. Defecting (swerving lanes, cutting people off) can gain you a bit of time relative to traffic, but only at the cost of slowing overall traffic down. The more people do it, the worse the congestion becomes for everyone.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Expect more crashes.
Great. So now in Sync equipped cars, I can expect a Personal Dashboard Assistant named Zippy to offer to wrest the steering wheel away from me.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
...effectively creating individual 'personalities' for over 800,000 road segments in the Seattle region. I live in Seattle, and let me tell ya, there's no getting around the traffic. There is exactly one major north-south highway (I-5)*, one major east-west highway (I-90), and one that does an end-around the city (I-405). An accident anywhere within city limits during rush hour will back up traffic on all three. Entrances and exits are so poorly designed that they routinely cause backups during non-peak hours (many have stoplights that prevent people from merging at speed, causing further delays). The constantly shifting number of lanes, exit-only lanes, carpool-only lanes, merging lanes, tunnels, hills, bridges, spaghetti interchanges, and various giant matriculated buses doing the four-lane-shuffle to get from the exit lane to the carpool lane and back all conspire to make traffic a hellishly unstable system that can collapse into a jam if someone so much as sneezes.Not to mention the worrying Seattle habit of driving exactly the same speed as the person to your right.
And the surface streets provide zero through routes. I have done time trials on my commute, trying various methods of getting there, and it turned out that even if traffic was bumper to bumper on the highway, taking the highway was still faster than any route on surface streets, and I only go a few miles.
The local television stations here already have real-time traffic maps on their websites, fully viewable by any web-enabled phone. They are fed by fairly accurate DOT sensors. The radio stations give traffic reports every 10 minutes on the drive home. My guess is that the Microsoft employees were fed up with Seattle traffic (as they should be) and then defaulted to their standard NIH mode for solving it.
I'm not sure how any more data can help the situation in Seattle. The problem is the roads, the drivers, and the lack of any sane public transportation. Not a lack of information. Microsoft should have spent that money to build some light rail instead.
------
*Some fellow Seattlites would argue that Route 99 counts as another north-south route. Considering that it's all stoplights north of UW and a dangerously out-of-repair viaduct through the city (that's likely to disappear altogether), I didn't count it.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Take public transit. I take the train from Long Beach to downtown Los Angeles every day. It is predictable and always takes the same amount of time. I take the bus from my house to the train station in the morning and back again at the end of the day. The extra time on the train is great for reading and various other activities that I could never do while sitting in rush hour traffic. With the cost of gas these days I save ~$100 a week riding the train.
I would expect a product named "Clearflow" to either help me beat a drug test or to fix a prostate problem.
Advice: on VPS providers
Au contraire, there's plenty of room to either build more roads or increase the size of the existing ones in Birmingham, a good example of them doing exactly that is the new route round the back of Selly Oak through a vast swathe of what were allotments and general wasteland to take the pressure of the Bristol Road and they most definitely could have built both more and bigger roads when the redid the Bull Ring but instead they seem to have devised some system which basically just crashes and reaches gridlock the moment there is any sort of incident on the A38.
Ideally yes, fewer cars is also a good solution but it's just not going to work if investments is not made in alternative methods of transport. Since the government refueses to make those investments - there is a perfectly good railway going from my house into town with, currently derelict, stations and everything on it which is simply not used - then cars are the only option and they should build the infrastructre to support the volume of cars they have.