MS Clearflow To Help Drivers Avoid Traffic Jams

Pioneer Woman writes "Microsoft announced plans to introduce a Web-based service for driving directions that incorporates complex software models to help users avoid traffic jams. The system is intended to reflect the complex traffic interactions that occur as traffic backs up on freeways and spills over onto city streets and will be freely available as part of the company's Live.com site for 72 cities in the US. Microsoft researchers designed algorithms that modeled traffic behavior by collecting trip data from Microsoft employees who volunteered to carry GPS units in their cars. In the end they were able to build a model for predicting traffic based on four years of data, effectively creating individual 'personalities' for over 800,000 road segments in the Seattle region. In all the system tracks about 60 million road segments in the US."

Swings & Roundabouts

[CmdrGravy]

This sounds like a sensible idea but if it becomes widespread then the metrics it has used for it's monitoring of the traffic conditions are going to change as people choose new routes based on it's suggestions with the upshot that previously clear routes are now congested.

My own journey to work changes based on the time I leave the house and my local knowledge of the area and problme junctions so I can normally make my way down side streets and 'rat runs' without encountering much traffic. The last thing I want is for anyone else to be told these routes and start to clog them up. It is amazing though the difference it can make if you take what is in theory a slightly longer route to get around stupidly placed roundabouts or congested main roads.

I guess ultimately if people had a perfect knowledge of the traffic situation the congestion would even out so everywhere is just congested at rush hour rather than extremely congested but the basic problem, in the UK at least, is that there just aren't enough roads. Here in Birmingham during the recent building work in the city centre there were some traffic conditions which would just lead inevitably to total gridlock as jams backed up across islands causing more jams which looped all the way around town to hold up the traffic in the original jam even more. We just need more roads.

Traffic jam warning

[Malevolent Tester]

Traffic is backing up 10 miles after a driver crashed reading Live.com when he should have been paying attention to the road

Traf-o-data is Traf-o-data again...

[tjstork]

Before Microsoft ever even did BASIC, Gates and Co had an abortive project called Traf-o-Data, which was somehow to help city planners with traffic management. Now Microsoft has come full circle. I wonder what's next.. after hearing so much about C# as the language of the future, are we going to get a big deal of BASIC?

Is it just me?

[zappepcs]

Where are the details? I've seen several attempts to use such data, and the way that traffic works, the slow-down is clear by the time it is posted to the Internet, and what shows green is red when you get there. Without a tactical HUD and real time data, such things are little more than novelties.

Everyday I drive past one intersection that has a slow down on good days. When there are traffic problems ahead, you cannot tell until you are in the traffic jam already. Normally, it takes 2-3 minutes and you're moving again. Some days it's merely a slow-down. Traffic analysis will never show when that stretch of road is fully in congestion and the only prudent course is to get off the highway.

I don't even care how many volunteers were in the study, modeling traffic has been done before and it does not predict the daily problems that you have to deal with.

Nothing short of a HUD with real time data will help. Well, voice assistance from a system with real time data will help also, doesn't require a HUD.

The point is that modeling won't do it. Only monitoring in real time will do it. Without real time data, by the time you get to the decision point half the other drivers are already clogging your escape route.

Wow, someone knows their history...

[WebCowboy]

Gates and Co had an abortive project called Traf-o-Data

That was not only the name of the product, it was the original name of Microsoft too.

Up until the 1970s traffic counters recorded the "hits" on their sensors on paper charts. Legions of clerks then counted the dots on the charts by hand in a manner not unlike the infamous Florida recount (looking at "chads" all day). The tallies were then given to "computers" (that was the job title for the person, not a machine in many if not most cases), or statisticians, to figure out if roads were being over-utilised. This service was performed by traffic analysis companies on contract by municipalities.

BillG and Paul Allen thought all this to be ridiculous as electronic computers were being widely adopted in academia and commerce, so they figured they'd save the municipalities tons of money by making a computer with the new Intel 8008 chip. Paul Allen wrote a simulator/development environment for the WSU mainframe, BillG developed the softwqare for the device itself and another friend built the hardware. It wasn't an "abortive" project--the device was completed and they made several thousand dollars using it to provide hourly traffic data to Washington state municipalities.

The reason for Traf-o-data's shortened lifespan was that the Washington state government started taking the paper tapes and feeding them through their own new computers to analyse the traffic at no cost to the municipalities. That quickly put Traf-o-data and several other companies out of the traffic analysis business in Washington state.

Gates and Allen retired the traf-o-data device and went off to college, but their business partnership remained intact. Within months the January 1975 Popular Electronics appeared with the MITS Altair 8800 as the cover story and gave Gates and Allen the opportunity for their next project. Gates and Allen sent a letter to Ed Roberts (MITS founder and Altair designer) offering to supply a BASIC interpreter...IIRC on Traf-o-data letterhead. (story goes that the address and phone number on the traf-o-data letterhead was for the Gates' Seattle-area residence, and when Roberts phoned one of BillG's parents answered and had no clue what this BASIC thing was about; the letter was actually sent from Harvard where BillG and Allen were studying and they forgot to tell BillG's parents about it--but that's just a story, like the one about IBM's men in dark suits showing up at Mrs. Kildall's doorstep). They modified Allen's 8008 simluator to fully support the 8080 procesor of the Altair and set forth writing the BASIC.

After the demo, Roberts hired them (well, Paul Allen at least was an employee) as MITS software development team, and they dropped out and moved to New Mexico to do business near MITS. Their business continued on the side, independent of MITS, and was re-named from Traf-o-data to Micro-soft (the hyphen disappeared when the company converted from a simple partnership into a corporation. They retained rights to supply BASIC to other computer vendors and end users, and then set about creating 6809 and 6502 ports of BASIC. Their BASIC quicky found its way onto IMSAI, ProcTech, Tandy and Commodore computers and the rest is history.

Perhaps BillG was feeling nostalgic about the Traf-o-data system that REALLY started it all for MSFT (not the Altair 8800 or the IBM 5150 as most people might think) and decided to pay homage to "the founder".

I just tried it

[Thelasko]

It gave me different directions to and from work. I guess this means it's accounting for traffic jams. I did notice that it doesn't ask what time you will be making this journey. In my experience lesser known streets are faster during rush hour, and larger streets and expressways are fastest at off-peak times.

Microsoft also needs to update their maps of Chicago. I-355 goes all the way to I-80 now. I thought it took Google a long time to fix that. Wow!