The Future Uleashed - Smart Roads, Smarter Drivers?
The Wall St Journal published a special Technology section today that is worth a read if you have a few minutes; most of it is available online. On the day that President Obama signed the stimulus bill providing funding to all kinds of initiatives, the WSJ took a look at what the future of technology could bring in terms of infrastructure improvements, and one of our favorite subjects; traffic and GPS.
The headline story about "Smart Roads" identified several technologies to predict and alert drivers to impending traffic jams that have yet to happen up to 45 minutes ahead of time. they mentioned IBM who is apparently working on such prediction technologies while potentially working on driverless car capabilities. The big news here is to have the vehicles and the road system in communication so that the system understands when there is an accident, and in realtime what the speed and traffic load is. If the system was smart enough to understand where you were going, it could plan out what cars will be off the road and when, further refining the traffic model. I was personally surprised that they didn't talk about Inrix and their current ability to predict traffic speeds days into the future, and their network of sensors, probe vehicles and cellular probes to model traffic.
The WSJ also highlighted Traffic.com, a service of NAVTEQ, Nokia's mapping company that allows you to set up driving routes and get traffic alerts and driving times sent right to your email or mobile phone. I have an account, and over the last year or so I have noticed that the drive times are fairly accurate (+/- 10 minutes on a traffic filled hour long commute), and give me a good sense of the driving conditions and what to expect on my commute. You can get the mobile version too: mobi.traffic.com.
Proxpro is a firm that is collecting traffic, routing, weather data and mashes that up with your appointments to figure out what the most efficient routes are to those appointments ahead of time. Think traveling rep who is on the road and needs to understand their day.
Let us know if you have a killer app, or insight into something cool-yet-to-come that has to deal with mapping, traffic or GPS.
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Posted by Scott Martin at February 17, 2009 8:34 PM
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