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Our Points
Thursday, March 1. 2007

Who's Providing Google's Traffic? No one's telling.

My first thought on seeing the announcement of the new service (available in just a few US cities) was, "who's providing the data?" (The big news in any of these announcements is who has found the latest undiscovered country of unique or best quality data? Recall Microsoft's recent deal with Intermap...) Google said it comes from a "variety of sources." Ok. John Cook wondered if Inrix, which is located just near Google, and is a Microsoft spin off (I didn't know that!) is involved. Google gave no comment. Inrix said, no, they are not involved with Google.

John Cook's Venture Blog (Seattle PI)

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google at 08:08 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0) | Bookmark and Share

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...and how do others who have live traffic sensor data play? What formats, standards, and is there a push toward standardization?
#1 Dave Smith (Link) on 2007-03-01 10:19 (Reply)
I suspect that Google is supplying the data itself. That is what I would do if I were them, just write some algorithms to analyze the images coming from the live traffic cams in each of those cities. Simple.
#2 Matthew Giger (Link) on 2007-03-01 11:20 (Reply)
I am not so sure that optical algorithms using live cams would be so easy or straight-forward - sometimes the "live video" gets choppy and unreliable for counts. More likely, more traditional methods and dedicated sensors are being employed, such as radar, acoustic and others.

I am curious as we are currently working with a few different mobile technologies (as opposed to hardwired, mounted fixtures) which use acoustic and other sensors, with the beauty of being redeployable (for work zones, special event traffic, et cetera).

Interestingly, there begins to be overlap between commercial providers and DOTs, with the business and policy models still somewhat muddy.
#3 Dave Smith (Link) on 2007-03-01 11:30 (Reply)
Google contacted state DOTs in early December '06 to inquire about working with them to make the information available, so that is one avenue that may be present.

Not only can live traffic cam video be choppy at times, but they often pan and switch the direction of the cameras.
#3.1 matt on 2007-03-01 13:46 (Reply)
Come on folks, doesn't this prove we're in the Matrix? Seriously, I'm not sure who is providing it, but it's been clear that there are many more players in the industry in the last few years.

I heard of one company that has mobilized a fleet of roving vans to do continuous realtime traffic monitoring.

State DOT's and major cities (Utah, VA) have been attempting to publish traffic-related web services since the late 90's in one form or another, often way ahead of the curve.

There may be other sneaky ways of calculating likely slowdowns from published weather conditions or traffic accident reports... even news wires... and Google is getting good at searching for context-specific news.

Gotta love imagination and innovation.
#4 Chris Andrews (Link) on 2007-03-07 00:33 (Reply)

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