Google and transportation information
Yesterday I read about two articles on Google's impact on transportation. One was "
Google's Online Maps Gets New Jersey Commuters On Time", the other, "
Observer Sees Google's Future In Transportation Routing". Both were available on
InformationWeek.
The NJ TRANSIT story is somewhat expected. With the power of Google Maps and Google Earth, Google's providing information on transportation systems is of no surprise to me. If Android becomes more acceptable to handset manufacturers and the
users (which I believe is just a matter of time), more and more
travelers might be able to get (near) real-time information from Google
or maybe other travel information providers (such as TrafficGauge, Inrix,
Traffic.com, SmarTraveler and traditional media companies) as well.
Nowadays getting near real-time data is much easier than before. GPS-equipped probe vehicles, for example, have already been used in many places in the US, China, and Europe, etc. Such data is very useful under general conditions. When sufficient historical data is available, it is relatively easy to optimize routing for a normal situation. The chanllange remains, however, when an (unexpected) incident occurs and it changes the traffic pattern significantly. In that case, having real-time information could still be very helpful. But what if most people on the road have access to such information? If all (or a significant fraction) of them change their behavior (e.g., route choice), then the situation might be even worse, and even real-time information may not be able to tell what is the best route because everything is so dynamic -- the road condition at the time one has to make a decision may be different from the condition he/she will eventually experience. In a non-recurrent situation like this, purely statistical methods might not be able to provide accurate and relevant information for travelers. A suitable model (such as DynaMIT) that can generate consistent anticipatory information would be more useful. It has built-in capability to handle drivers' "overaction" to the travel information in this situation.
I would say the
transportation routing patent by Google is somewhat unexpected. After quickly skimming through the patent, I had the impression that the patent is more about how to process the data and provide it to users via wireless devices. How they obtain the data and what kind of data could be used is not detailed. Anyway, this reminded me a meeting last week with Dr. Ramachandran Ramjee, who is currently a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, India. He has some interesting ideas on how to collect traffic data from Smart Phones.
I believe in maybe a few years we will be able to collect pretty good (and huge amount of) traffic data from cell phones and use it for travler information. If I know some company is working on this now, I would be very interested to work for them. :-)