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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.
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"
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.
Sometimes it just feels like people are conspiring to avoid me, finally I've got some proof!
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.
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.
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."
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!
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.
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.
it would be easier to put toll roads in vista.
If people can get past, can they get future? Best way to confuse a stoner
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.
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
Right here, dude! I took a shower this morning though, so maybe you guys can give me a second chance, huh?
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.
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".
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.