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Google Maps Directions Adds Real-Time Traffic Estimates
First time accepted submitter constpointertoconst writes "If you use Google Maps to calculate directions, you may now notice (if your route is covered by their traffic data) an 'in current traffic' travel estimate for current route. Some may recall that Google Maps had a similar estimate in the past, but it was removed last year due to poor accuracy."
No they're not. It is just the classic Google Maps "get directions" feature, but with realtime traffic estimates. Suppose your comment was just a way to bash Google.
Another great way to avoid getting speeding tickets is to not break the speed limit.
Most of the time you can omit A & B, Google can guess where you are, and where you want to go, based on your mails, maps accesses, time, day, birthdays of you, your family and girlfriend (Sorry, no you don't have a girlfriend), and web searches...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
No they're not. It is just the classic Google Maps "get directions" feature, but with realtime traffic estimates. Suppose your comment was just a way to bash Google.
Actually, what I think the parent is worried about is how Android navigation might provide information to Google, and from a programming point of view it seems entirely possible (and even sensible) to correlate map tile request frequency with traffic flow (I assume Android navigation fetches new map tiles as needed). So, conceivably Google could collect and archive information like 'john.doe@gmail.com's mobile phone is travelling at 90 mph along the Interstate' if you use Google Maps for turn-by-turn navigation.
On the other hand, it's my understanding that traffic data is purchased from companies like transport companies who fit their trucks with GPS for realtime logistics purposes (I've sometimes seen alerts for traffic queues on empty roads where there are transport lorries parked by the roadside). These days traffic data is also reported by modern Sat Nav units (e.g. http://consumerist.com/2011/04/tomtom-sold-speeding-data-to-police-cops-used-it-to-bust-drivers.html ) and as said maybe Google can harvest a bit of traffic data from their Android sets as well.
Whether we like it or not, companies like Google buy and harvest traffic data from misc existing sources, and use this data to propagate their results. Those drivers who knowingly or unknowingly share their traffic data will help those of us who just want to avoid being stuck in traffic.
Wouldn't that just piss of the other drivers? Why on earth could one want to stick to those ridiculous and arbitrary limits?
Options:
(1) Piss off other drivers;
(2) Increase chance of killing people.
Yeah, I'll go for (1), thanks. But please feel free to fight like some neanderthal religious nut against the laws of physics/biology and explain to us why collisions at faster speeds aren't much more likely to cause serious injury or death.
Do you realize that what you are proposing is entirely possible?
* Use a computer under your control (any old GPS device with stored maps, for example).
* Pick a bunch of points, including 'A' and 'B', and let google calculate every possible route between them.
* Pick a bunch of points NOT including 'A' and 'B', ask for routes between those points, and hope one of them includes both 'A' and 'B'.
None of these methods reveal where point 'A' and 'B' are, and all can take realtime traffic into account.
As the link of TFA says; the congestion data is derived from the opt-in data they crowdsource from 'My Location'.
The only way your 'traffic data' could be shared 'unknowingly' is through ignorance.
then Google users would unwittingly create said traffic conditions. It actually presents an interesting problem in optimization. Suppose that car GPS installations begin to feature the Google Maps traffic estimation. Not only would people unfamiliar with an environment be compelled to use the new feature but even those who are regular auto commuters. Those who wish to save time getting home would all be directed along the same main roads which at the time would report lower traffic. These users would, however, in turn create traffic on those same roads that originally looked so appealing. Unless the units could communicate with eachother to distribute drivers evenly along roots with approximately equal favorable traffic conditions, a system like this would present problems if it were to become sufficiently ubiquitous. It is related to the problem with automated trading systems on the stock market. Many systems at holding companies would observe that a stock has crossed some critical threshold and would begin to buy or sell in vast quantities automatically. The resulting change in value does not contribute to the market's ability to allocate capital, but instead is just a fluke resulting from a Boolean algorithm. All I'm saying is... this traffic business may cause unforeseen issues.
I have news for you. The black helicopters... they only exist in your mind.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
A few points:
In your scheme they don't need to track who is requesting map tiles in order to get traffic estimates, although they may get slightly more accurate velocity data from doing so (which can be pseudonymous).
Maps and especially turn-by-turn directions has a nasty habit of prefetching and caching large amounts of map. Directions, for example,prefetches your entire predicted route and now, apparently, also prefetches "some" deviations from that path.
Map tiles are large compared to the size of roads, so in any place with a reasonably high road density (e.g., inside a city), your traffic estimates will be useless because of lack of precision.
More accurately:
(1) Piss off other drivers
(2) Line government coffers at gunpoint
Personally I stick to the speed limit, and usually have a line of angry drivers behind me. Not my problem, get mad at your government, not at me. Increase speed limits to the 85th percentile on all non-residential roads.
Since you're avoiding #2 above, I assume you simply don't drive. What? There's a practical amount of risk you must accept to live? Well, at least you only drive 5 mph, right?
Do you honestly think that the posted speed limit is some magical number above which your risk jumps significantly? There is some science to the posted limit -- traffic engineers know a few things! But in many cases it's there for revenue reasons or political reasons. Think for yourself.
Why not? I turned it on, and I hope more people do too. In my area the traffic estimates are dead accurate and updated constantly. There's no easier method of aggregating this data accurately than crowd sourcing devices which communicate with you anyway.
By the way, you're welcome.
Actually, what I think the parent is worried about is how Android navigation might provide information to Google
There's no might about it. Android is pretty open to what it's doing and gives you the choice whether or not to participate in location sharing when you first turn on the phone. The option is also settable later in the Location part of System Settings.
I feel dumber after reading that post, as does likely everyone who has read such nonsense.
If they want to break the speed limit, they can overtake. Fucked if I'm stopping to pull them out of the ditch when they crash, though.
Another great way to avoid getting arrested for producing raw milk and selling it to willing consumers is to not produce a product that people wish to purchase.
Another great way to avoid getting jailed for reading banned books is to not read them.
Time in between A and B? Possibly fallacious, or possibly just reduced by that attitude
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wouldn't that just piss of the other drivers? Why on earth could one want to stick to those ridiculous and arbitrary limits?
Except around a left exit, the far left lane is for passing and all other lanes are the travel lanes. Stay in the travel lanes and no one cares if you do the limit in every state I've driven in. And on most roads, people aren't doing much over the limit to begin with.
Black helicopters? The 1990s called, they want your concept of paranoia back.
Options:
(1) Piss off other drivers;
(2) Increase chance of killing people.
Yeah, I'll go for (1), thanks. But please feel free to fight like some neanderthal religious nut against the laws of physics/biology and explain to us why collisions at faster speeds aren't much more likely to cause serious injury or death.
It's the difference in speed that causes turbulence in traffic that causes the dangerous situations that get people into collisions. Dramatically slower moving vehicles become obstacles that other vehicles try to flow around. Whether they are right or wrong to do it, people see empty space and they will try to fill it up, that's the laws of psychology at work. They might be bad drivers, but they are quite predictable and you can do some simple things to not contribute to their having an accident.
Don't be an asshole driving super fast. Don't be an asshole driving super slow. Let people get over if they turn on their indicator so they don't do something stupid to get to their exit. Don't drive in the far left lane unless you're passing. Stagger your vehicle when possible so that people around you can change lanes unexpectedly. It's not rocket science, mostly basic courtesy.
Since you're avoiding #2 above, I assume you simply don't drive. What? There's a practical amount of risk you must accept to live? Well, at least you only drive 5 mph, right?
Do you honestly think that the posted speed limit is some magical number above which your risk jumps significantly? There is some science to the posted limit -- traffic engineers know a few things! But in many cases it's there for revenue reasons or political reasons. Think for yourself.
It's usually set by taking some percentile of what people naturally drive at in typical weather. Most drivers have years of experience and know what speeds they feel comfortable driving at, and it's collectively safest if everyone does about the same speed.
Or at least, that would be a nice way to hack it. Keep everybody off the route you want to take, by having Google tell everyone else to avoid it. Google reports for your route: Bumper to bumper traffic jams, overturned tractor trailers, oil slicks, zombie attacks, etc.
And you'll have an open road.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Where I live, the base traffic is pretty predictable. Certain interchanges will be slow, certain arteries will be slow, but really the random feature are accidents. Some outlying areas have really bad drivers, because there is always an accident. other places not so much. In any case, Google is horrible at providing traffic data. We have a local service that is nearly perfect. There has been times when I have been sitting still on the freeway, and Google has told me that we were moving at posted speeds. No indication of a problem. Frankly I don't use it much anymore.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Well, Duh!
The speed limit is the speed other drivers expect you to be driving at If you go faster, there is a far bigger chance that they will fail to see you, or wrongly estimate your speed. This risk is even higher for the young, the old, and the very stupid, and last I heard, the extremely stupid are still allowed to use the roads (I offer your post in evidence). If you fail to notice them too, because you have less time to see them, the resultant accident will be more serious because of the greater kinetic energy.
I am not claiming the actual speed limits are sensible - just that the fact that they are there is a self-justifying situation. No limit, or a limit way above that which most people think is safe, might well be safer. However, no one has done any meaningful research on the subject.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Try the Waze app. It's a working crowd sourced navigation tool. It actively routes around or at least notifies you of slowdowns ahead, as well as other traffic hazards and police locations.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
maybe Google can harvest a bit of traffic data from their Android sets as well
If you have an Android device, go into Settings and look under "Location & security". There's an option there "Use location for Google Search". The description is "Let Google use your location to improve search results and other services". When you first power up a new Android device, it asks you whether you'd like to turn that on or not.
Because the GPS receiver is nearly always off (being a power hog), Wifi-based location is spotty (except in cities, where it's surprisingly accurate), and network-based location is so inaccurate, I doubt Google gets a great deal of useful traffic velocity data from people who just happen to have an Android phone in their car -- but Android devices that are actively being used for navigation would provide great traffic data. I don't know what percentage of drivers on the road are navigating with Android devices and have given Google permission to use their location, though.
Personally, I really like the traffic data provided by Google Navigator. It's very accurate, wherever it comes from. The only downside is that it is too limited; traffic data is usually only available on major highways.
The logical next step to make this even better, is to predict future traffic, rather than just reporting current traffic. It's really not very interesting to me to know what the traffic is like 80 miles ahead on my planned route. What I'd really like to know -- and what I'd really like Navigator's routing algorithm to know -- is what the traffic probably will be like when I get there. Mining traffic pattern data over time, correlating it with normal commuting patterns, special events, identifying accidents, etc., should make it possible to predict near-future traffic with considerable accuracy, excepting, of course, for unpredictable random events like accidents. Even there, though, as soon as an accident begins to cause traffic problems it might be identified, and re-routing performed. Perhaps other signals might be used, too... do radio traffic reporters have some digitally-accessible feed? Could Google get access to real-time accident information from emergency services?
Lots of possibilities here...
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I mean, it is nice to know that Google's fastest route is a disaster because freeway traffic that was assumed to move at 50mph is actually doing only 5mph but when is Google or any other map service going to use this information to calculate a route that works well now?
It would even be a nice touch to update the estimates based on a projected time. Right now, I can change the map to show traffic conditions at 9:00am Monday morning but the time estimate is still based on 11:00am Saturday.
To the people modding the AC down - the parent comment looks like a joke to me.
Well, I work in traffic software and services area and have spoken with one of the lead developers from Google for the traffic features. The Google Traffic team is located in Zürich, Switzerland by the way. ...)
How it works (and this is not a Google exclusive, TomTom is doing more or less the same, many others as well), at least in general terms:
- Google receives map and/or navigation requests
- If it's from a mobile device and the GPS is activated the requests contain a GPS coordinate of the device
- The location is matched to the underlaying digital road network
- The next location from a subsequent request is matched to the road network as well
- From the difference in location on the road network and in time a vector is created which contains the speed on the road
- Before, during and after this, there are a lot of filters to filter out unwanted data (pedestrians, locations not on the road network,
- After aggregating all data for the whole road network on a individual link basis, one can estimate a level of service and corresponding travel times
It'd be quite stupid NOT to do this with the location data which is contained in the requests anyways. The quality of the traffic state derived by this method is in direct relation to the amount of devices on the road. With the amount of android devices or other devices using Google Maps, they have little competition.
Of course data privacy is a concern, but for the process above, there is no need to track a single source over a long period of time. Some FCD/FPD systems (floating car data / floating phone data) use frequent (every minute) randomly changing IDs. This is enough for getting the vectors required to calculate traffic states.
Try the Waze app. It's a working crowd sourced navigation tool. It actively routes around or at least notifies you of slowdowns ahead, as well as other traffic hazards and police locations.
Where I live (Finland), the cops aren't generally considered to be enemies so I don't want to participate in any application that warns people about their location...
The only way your 'traffic data' could be shared 'unknowingly' is through ignorance.
And even then, ignorance wouldn't really work in this case (unless you're someone who just stole someone else's phone).
They keep on reminding you that you're sharing your location with them both through the Android interface, and also through an email reminder (that you can't turn off even if you wanted to) at least once a month.
See the "Quest" view at top-right. It gets even better when you zoom all the way in to StreetView.
The speed limit is the speed other drivers expect you to be driving at
Absolutely not. I-88 outside of chicago (part of my commute) has a speed limit of 55, and the only two times I've ever seen people traveling under 70 was in rain or if there was a cop in the median. Every city I've lived in has the same effect.
Speed limits are a number of things, but they're certainly not "the speed other drivers expect you to be driving at"
-Bucky
As long as you stay to the right and allow faster traffic to overtake you on the left*, be my guest. And, to be very clear, this applies to any road with multiple lanes for one direction of travel, not just highways.
*This is for U.S. driving, the customary lanes for slower travel may vary in your country.