It seems that when you're trucking along (in the USA, UK, France or China, at least), navigating using Google Maps on your smartphone, you're actually helping crowd source traffic data for Google, i.e. the application is reporting back to Google on your position and speed, a process described here in detail. While there are possible privacy implications in this, it does seem an interesting approach - or at least it would be if there were enough people using the system - so far in the UK, only motorways seem to be tagged for traffic status. Comments welcome.
Read on in the full article.
Given enough participants (and this is the limiting factor), this is the cheapest, most accurate and reliable way of measuring fast changing distributed data like traffic. You aggregate many points of data, so a single wrong report doesn't affect the data, you don't have personal biases creeping in, and it's reliable across multiple single points of failure. Crowd sourcing works.
Also a shame that there is traffic info for motorways in England, but not in Wales.
As usual, Nokia has this up and running earlier: http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/02/08_gps.shtml
and a very similar idea was mooted some time ago by some other researchers elsewhere, so it's not an idea totally original to Google. Checking with mobile network base stations allows you to assess whether traffic is moving or not. I believe these people faced some regulatory issue, or persuading people to use the system. Google Maps adopting it is probably the best hope for it actually getting off the ground, because it needs widespread use to work of course. I suspect the Nokia version will be built into Ovi Maps soon and take off too.
TomTom is also running a similar program for a number of countries at http://www.tomtom.com/hdtraffic/. Not all countries from the dropdown list on the top right work, it does work for The Netherlands, London and Berlin.
If Google Maps allowed a full map to be downloaded and persisted in cache like Nokia Maps then it migh actually become usable.
Unregistered wrote:If Google Maps allowed a full map to be downloaded and persisted in cache like Nokia Maps then it migh actually become usable.
It works. It may not allow for a full download, but the maps load really fast even over a GPRS / EDGE connection, which means that size of the maps is really not that much. Should not cost you much even on a data plan. And if you have a unlimited data plan, nothing to worry about. I personally even like some of the other features like layers, sat / map view and find it fairly good to use on a phone.
The best thing is you dont need a built in (or bluetooth connected) GPS to use it. It gives you a fairly accurate location on the basis of using cell tower information.
The only thing missing is voice navigation.
TomTom's data in the UK come from Vodafone phones, which is probably the only way to get sufficient data for a reliable service.
this is a very good feature if the privacy of data is not compromised.
i m in india and have been a regular user of the g maps
the only thing that is missing is the auto rotate feature--- that is to keep the direction of movement towards top when moving. This is helpful when the cell is on a car kit and there is no diectional confusion.
Traffic is still not available in this part of the world..... not many people are using it over here in India.... or at least the Northrn India .......
LOL
rohit k
i've got nothing to fear as a law abiding citizen, but Steve's got it dead right about the potential privacy impacts of this and similar tech.
Thing is, I like tech, my phones and gadgets. What I don't like is that they want to monetise what I do. I'm ok if they use and dump the data for this described purpose, but they can't be trusted can they? And our UK government is useless in this area. They give it away, just as in the Phorm and BT Webwise saga. They need to frame some laws quick.