Monday, June 7, 2010

Google Latitude – Traffic Jam I-94

Google Latitiude Traffic Jam
Above is a image from Google Latitude. From the data you can see that the distance between geo blips is very short. The back up was about a mile as the freeway was completely closed west bound as the result of a car accident. Traveling one mile took about forty-five minutes.

Google receives geo blip data from users of Latitude. This data can pinpoint traffic congestion and perhaps one day areas that have a lot of traffic jams. Perhaps the causes of the traffic jams could be investigated and solutions implemented to improve traffic flows and driver safety.

What would be interesting is if Google called people (Google Voice users) that are in the traffic jam. They could provide insights about the cause (construction, accident etc). Perhaps first responders could be contacted with data live from the scene.

2 comments:

Neil Stelkic said...

How often does it GeoBlip? Do you have to have the Google Latitude app open? OR does the regular map somehow already track this information but not share it.

David Damore said...

Neil,

It seems that the time between GeoBlips can vary. Over night it is about every 30 minutes or so. Sometimes during the day it is every 6 minutes and sometimes more frequent. This could be because a map application was active at the time.

Google Latitude is running in the background.

To see your own GeoBlip data you need to turn that feature on in Latitude.

See https://www.google.com/latitude/apps/history and look for "Settings" near the bottom.

David