Tuesday, December 10, 2013

This post is from the white paper on Inrix web site : Fueling future mobility with big data.
This paper talks about how high quality traffic data and sophisticated analysis helps get people around quickly and efficiently. High quality traffic data helps in more than one way. First it improves journey times. We can see how by seeing more accurate data to the user and improving the satisfaction. Second, the traffic data is a layer that helps build applications for connected cars and smarter cities.
Mobile devices, applications and internet sites help provide digital maps that improve navigation. Navigation technology has become so ubiquitous its no longer a differentiating factor and is demanded as even a built-in feature across utilities. However, traffic data is different from navigation and there are several variables. First coverage for all available roads and not just the busy ones is a differentiating factor for traffic data. Coverage expands the choices for the routes that are not available otherwise and have frequently hurt the driver experience. Second, exact locations and dimensions of a traffic queue is critical to planning routes. This level of detail is generally not available with most providers. Traffic data has been sticky to specific maps and sometimes services, making it available widely and consistently has been a challenge. Timeliness of incidents reports to the driver is critical to knowing change of routes or other impact. There is an industry wide latency in providing such data.
Inrix strives to improve traffic data on all of these fronts with its traffic data service, hoping to make an impact to driving but in how driving shapes city planning. The source of the traffic data is the crowd and this is expected to increase rapidly with more penetration by applications and implementations. The coverage is improving where 1 million miles of road is now added where only 3 million miles were being covered. Moreover, the traffic can now be painted on any map, any device and in several countries.
With the rising popularity of public transit, I'm excited to see improvements in bus traffic locally here on the east side.

No comments:

Post a Comment