Crowdsourced Arterial Traffic on Google Maps

Coming back to NYC from a recent trip to LA has given me mixed feelings about driving vs. public transportation. I love driving.. but no one likes traffic. And, being in NYC, I haven’t used any traffic-related features on any map in a while.. so it’s a nice surprise to read that Google has announced today that arterial (non-highway) traffic is (and has been for select cities) available on Google Maps. As you zoom-in on the map, the arterial roads will show current traffic conditions, exactly like what they already do on highways.



This is great, as you no longer need to simply assume that arterial roads will be faster when the highways are congested. Even better, you can see exactly which roads are less congested. However, the more interesting part is how this data is generated — crowdsourced of course! If you use Google Maps for Mobile with My Location enabled on a GPS-capable phone (iPhone excluded), you can send anonymous data back to Google to describe how fast you’re moving. Thus, the aggregate of all the data collected is used to come up with an estimate on live traffic conditions. Am I the only one who thinks this is awesome?!

Of course, privacy is always a huge question; and of course, Google knows this and has taken steps to ensure that privacy protections are built-in from the start. So don’t worry, we won’t know how fast you were speeding on the 91 freeway. And, another immediately obvious question is — what about when you’re not in a car.. what if you’re walking, or on a bike, or similar? I think there could be a pretty simple algorithm to filter these inputs, or if not, then they could be seen as statistical outliers that are just part of the margin of error in the estimates. (Would be interesting for cities like NYC though). Regardless, next time I get a chance to drive, I’ll be sure to use (and contribute) to this feature.

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