Traffic Jams and the 800 Pound Gorilla

Google just bought Waze, the company that developed an app that warns you about traffic jams and suggests diversions to take. In case you were wondering how that is any different (or better) than what you might hear on the good old radio, then these lines by Jeff Jarvis should help understand:
“A long-ago colleague of mine said his rule was to go wherever the radio traffic reports said there was a jam because (a) by the time they found out about it, the jam was gone and (b) every other idiot was listening to the radio and avoiding that spot themselves.”

So how does a phone app like Waze address these two problems?

Well, Waze solves the first problem – delay in identifying jams – by collecting data from all those smartphones in real time and then inferring where the jam is. How? If lots of people on a route slow down or barely appear to move (stop and go traffic), then the Waze servers infer there must be a jam. And warn the others to take alternative routes. Since your movement is tracked via the GPS on your phone, nobody needs to call in or key in such info: the raw data (slow speed) is automatic sent from the phone! To add to it, if things then speed up along that section, it means the jam has cleared. Again, something that can be inferred automatically.

Of course, users can voluntarily add alerts manually too. Or update others’ alerts (“That broken down car has now been moved”).

Ok then, what about the second problem – if everyone takes the diversion, wouldn’t we back to square one? I think this was not an issue for Waze since it was in the Goldilocks zone: it had enough users to make the data accurate; but not so many that their actions changed the environment significantly.

But with Google taking over, the user count could potentially go through the roof (even if it is indirectly done by integrating Waze into Google’s other services like directions or maps). So it would indeed be interesting to see how Google, the 800 pound gorilla, handles that problem. Jarvis though is confident it will still work because, hey:
“Google and Waze are a helluva lot smarter than anybody on radio.”

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarJune 19, 2013 at 9:02 PM

    It would be good to see this happening. However, warnings about jams will become almost endemic in a city like Bangalore and road users will just shrug their shoulders and continue as it is something they need to live with!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more