GigaOM » traffic data

Is less gridlock a sign of slow growth, or just fewer cars?

Derrick Harris — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 17:10:47 +0000

While most of us view traffic congestion as an inconvenience (or worse), at least one company views congestion as a symptom of a healthy economy. It appears both camps are probably correct, although increases in public transit ridership, bicycling and other alternative means of transportation could make the latter slightly less telling.

On Monday, INRIX, the Seattle company that collects and analyzes traffic data from many millions of mobile phones and vehicles, released the latest version of INRIX Gridlock Index, which the company claims serves as an indicator of economic strength. Essentially, the logic goes, a smaller increase in the amount of time people are stuck in traffic means a smaller increase in the number of people on the roads trying to get to work or to the mall to buy things. The report quotes INRIX CEO Bryan Mistele offering a cautiously optimistic outlook on the situation:

“The good news is that IGI continued to show signs of an economic recovery. However, it’s less robust than we all would have liked, or expected, as we head into 2013. In fact, some of the lower IGI scores we saw from last November are flashing yellow warning lights – for these local economies and possibly for the nation as a whole.”

Among those slower-than-average growth cities are Atlanta, Chicago and Detroit. INRIX points to Chicago’s slow growth as providing support for at least on negative report on the city’s economy. In Atlanta, on the other hand, INRIX claims its data might act as a damper to reports of faster-than-average economic growth in the region.

Source: INRIX

So, is INRIX’s assessment correct? Perhaps.

Historically, at least, congestion does appear to be a side effect (although certainly not a cause) of thriving economies. According to Florida Atlantic University professor Eric Dumbaugh in a June article in The Atlantic Cities, as per capita driving delay goes up, so does per capita GDP:

Source: Eric Dumbaugh / The Atlantic

However, as Dumbaugh notes, there is an upward trend in workers — especially younger workers — eschewing both suburbs and cars by living in urban areas and choosing to commute via public transportation or, in a growing number of cities, bicycle. In a city like Las Vegas, for example, public transportation isn’t very good, but an attempt by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh to gentrify the downtown area (and move his company’s headquarters, along with nearly 2,000 employees, there from the suburbs) could help take drivers off the road even as economic activity picks up.

Statistics on public transportation support this claim. According to the American Public Transportation Association, nationwide ridership had been steadily increasing since the late 1990s before taking a pretty sharp nosedive at the height of the recession in the first quarter of 2009. Since then, however, rates have been on the rise again. Even car-centric Los Angeles has seen an uptick in public transit usage, as has Chicago.

Source: INRIX

In fact, when charted against employment statistics even INRIX found that congestion rates have fallen along with the unemployment rate. INRIX suggests that discouraged workers might be driving down congestion rates, but an alternative reading would be that people returning to work are increasingly choosing alternative means of transportation to save money or lower their carbon footprints. According to 2011 statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, 9.7 percent of American workers carpool, a combined 3.4 percent walk or bicycle, and 4.3 percent work from home.

Looking at these numbers, at least, it’s difficult to say how good a measure of economic health congestion actually will be going forward. It certainly seems like a valuable data point and one worth considering in economic forecasts — especially as companies like INRIX are able to make traffic-data analysis so much more accurate — but it almost certainly doesn’t tell the whole story. Cities are complicated entities, and as more Americans choose to drive less, or just smarter, we’ll likely need to figure out new ways of assessing how vibrant they really are.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Aaron Kohr.

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Researchers say Waze data could help prevent accidents

Derrick Harris — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 23:21:48 +0000

Apple might not want it, but a group of Israeli researchers certainly like crowdsourced navigation app Waze. Using data submitted by Waze users in Israel, the team from Ben-Gurion University uncovered some findings that, in theory at least, could signal to police and public-safety officials where they might best invest resources to prevent further damage.

The researchers studied more than 5,000 accident reports as well as nearly 30,000 reports of police presence to determine where the most accidents happen and whether police were often nearby. What they found was that 75 percent of the most-accident-prone areas were intersections, and that there were many instances where police were monitoring safer intersections and weren’t subsequently reported as being at accident sites shortly after they occurred. When police did respond, the average response time was just over 28 minutes.

Satellite image from Google Earth combined with accident and police report heatmap – area units with high accident scores (marked as redand white ellipses) and high police scores (marked as purple circles). Source: IEEE 27th Convention of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

According to the paper, future directions for this research include analyzing the effect of greater police presence on the number accidents and “us[ing] machine learning techniques to understand the causes that make some intersections more dangerous than others.”

These researchers are just one of many groups trying to make sense of traffic data to improve our commuting lives, though. A few that we’ve covered recently are INRIX, which collects real-time traffic data from millions of cars, commercial vehicles and mobile phones; Xerox, which is trying to quell congestion on the streets and freeways of Los Angeles; and Nokia, which is experimenting with a credit-based system for finding and reporting open parking spots.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user isaravut.

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Why better traffic data means more than just a faster commute

Derrick Harris — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 18:30:46 +0000

You might never have heard of Inrix, but there’s a good chance it’s already helped you out — or vice versa.

The company, which specializes in real-time traffic data, powers a wide variety of in-vehicle navigation systems, mobile apps, commercial fleet management systems and even Google Maps. The secret behind Inrix’s success that it collects lots of data from lots of drivers in order to help everyone get where they’re going faster. But saving commuters driving time is just the beginning of the company’s plans. It thinks traffic data can help change a wide variety of industries, maybe even the world.

100 million devices and 1.8 million miles of road

That a traffic-data company could contribute to such macro-level change might seem laughable until you get a sense of Inrix’s scale. According to founder and CEO Bryan Mistele, 6 of the 8 auto companies with built-in navigations systems (including Ford, BMW and Audi) use and share Inrix data, as do 8 of the 12 top navigation apps in Apple’s App Store (including MapQuest, Garmin, Microsoft and Telenav). Many of the commercial trucks we see on the streets are sharing data with Inrix too, and even “dumb” phones without GPS and internet connections are sharing location data with the company through cell towers.

All told, the company counts more than 100 million endpoints as its data sources and covers more than 1.8 million miles of road worldwide, Mistele said. Its total volume of traffic data, which the company crunches through constantly to generate real-time information, is more than 500TB. It runs its own homemade big data infrastructure, Mistele says, because “there are no off-the-shelf packages [not even Hadoop] that in real time can process that amount of data.”

From real-time to predicting the future

And generating real-time traffic conditions is only a portion of what Inrix provides to the customers that pay for its services. The company also brings in, among other sources, weather data, accident data and sensor data in order to provide insights into how traffic is likely to shape up. By factoring in the location, number of cars involved and whether there are injuries, for example, Mistele said Inrix can predict how long an accident will hold up traffic at a given location.

Because it has so much historical information from such a broad set of sources, Inrix is also able discern reality from situations that might confuse models that are only concerned with whether vehicles are moving or stopped. Mistele said the system is smart enough to know that a car sitting at a stoplight on an arterial road is not akin to a car stuck in a traffic jam on a highway, or that taxi cabs and UPS trucks stopping and going are not signs of stop-and-go traffic conditions.

Disrupting industries, and urban sprawl

Aside from consumer navigation apps and those helping commercial drivers manage their delivery schedules, a number of state, regional municipal and even national governments use Inrix’s analytic services to help gauge a number of issues relating to road management. Mistele said the company has actually disrupted the media industry, too, by helping spur the end of traffic helicoptors and “traffic on the nines” on local radio stations. For customers like Clear Channel, it’s just a lot cheaper, easier and more effective to feed their on-air talent with real-time data and information that someone else has put together.

“This is a space where there has been a complete transformation [thanks to big data and crowd sourcing],” Mistele said.

As great as it is helping people get from Point A to Point B, though, being able to get a handle on traffic data could have even further-ranging effects. Insurance companies can use the data to determine more-accurate rates, and some hedge funds are using Inrix’s data as a means for determining economic health — more drivers during rush hour means more people working, Mistele explained. During the London Olympics, data from mobile devices helped officials monitor the movement of people, not traffic, throughout the city.

A shot of Xerox’s City Manager for parking

As cities continue to grow and congestion becomes an even bigger problem in terms of decreasing productivity and increasing pollution, it’s that kind of data from companies such as Inrix (or competitors Nokia Navteq and TomTom) that could help mitigate the effects. Xerox, for example, already uses Inrix data as part of its efforts to help cities improve urban planning around roads, mass transit and parking spaces. The more that city planners know about how, where and when their citizens move, the better they can plan transit systems that address those realities, or that can more easily respond when problems arise.

“Give people better data, give governments better data,” said Mistele, “and you can have a huge impact on one of the biggest of the biggest problems in our society.”

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user TonyV3112.

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