January 6, 2006

Inrix - Traffic PREDICTION

Readers of GPS Lodge might remember the name Inrix as I have mentioned the company here a couple of times. Inrix has taken on the test of modeling traffic in major cities and then predicting what will happen as a result of bad weather, or an accident, let's say. Inrix knows that when an accident happens in the middle lane on a certain major road, that it will take so many hours for the road to clear again and function normally. Inrix watches in real time what is happening and then predict what traffic will be like as a result. With this information you can route plan for the fastest routing.

There are a couple of nice write up on them with some extra news (links below).

It ends up that Inrix wants to have th top 30 metro areas available by the end of 2006 for subscriptions services. They recently announced a partnership with Tele Atlas (see article), so one would imagine that they would work through them to offer these services. Tele Atlas works with MapQuest, T-Mobile, Cobra and TomTom right now to name a couple.

About 3,000 drivers in the Seattle area have been using a prototype service based on Inrix's technology. The flow information is fed to smart phones, and sections of the city's highways show up as green, yellow, red, or black, depending on the level of congestion. The phones also display estimated times until roads will either clear or become clogged with traffic. Currently the estimate is that Inrix gets things right about 88% of the time when forecasting conditions out to 48 hours in the future. Not bad!

"The goal, says Bryan Mistele [president and CEO of Inrix], is to provide drivers with truly useful information about traffic, such as the best route for a delivery van, the ideal time to leave work, how to reroute a trip to avoid an accident, or even an estimate of travel time from a New York City hotel to Newark Airport next Thursday evening. And while the cost to individual consumers will be set by resellers, current traffic services range in price from $20 to $120 a year."

I am going to try to keep bringing you information on Inrix, because I think that automotive GPS units need live traffic feeds for now, and predictive traffic feeds for tomorrow. Inrix looks well positioned to fill this need in the marketplace.

More information in MIT's Technology Review - ReadMore

More Information and an interview with Bryan Mistele in the Telematics Journal - ReadMore

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