Hacking Massachusetts highway traffic

Getting predictions from Inrix or Google Maps (which uses Inrix, we think). There's plenty of real-time data available, but it's not predictive, at least not publicly.

Which is one of the reasons that we did this. Google Maps/Inrix/Sigalert can tell you what the traffic is right now. We try to tell you what the traffic will be an hour from now, or what the typical traffic is at a given time (beyond green, yellow and red that you'll get on Google).

Case in point: Last week Google Maps had a blog post about Thanksgiving traffic. It was not specific to any one area, and, for Boston, at least, it wasn't really, uh, right. Three points they make:

• Traffic is heaviest on Tuesday in Boston (most other areas Wednesday). This is true.
• "Thanksgiving Day Traffic is a breeze." This is false. Traffic on Thanksgiving morning on the Pike Westbound is heavier than westbound traffic on Tuesday or Wednesday past 128.
• Traffic is better on Sunday than Saturday. OH GOD DON'T LISTEN TO THEM. Travel delays on the Pike Westbound on Saturday average about 20 minutes. On Sunday, it's close to two hours.

Much more in a blog post here.

Not to gloat, but we think our data—or at least how we present the data—are better than what you'll get from Google Maps. Just sayin'.

I've ridden from Medford to CT, NY, VT, etc more then most but how is knowing the cycling routes going to help when you're stuck on I-84 in a car? Even if you had a bike with you it's not exactly possible to pull over and leave the car at the side of the road for the weekend.

Most GPSs can re-navigate using side roads but when everyone tries to do this you're back to square one or just better off sitting in traffic. If you're on the bike the amount of traffic won't matter much one way or another once you're out of the city and don't have traffic lights and other cyclists to slow you down.

In short, if you have to go long distances and you can't leave early/late prepare for major suckage. Just like every year.

Although predicting human behavior in response to weather forecasts are not something we do, yet. Perhaps we need to build the French Toast Alert in to the model, as well as something which measures the width of Harvey Leonard's SEG.

The use of 'hacker' to describe a person who [enjoys/is good at] using clever coding techniques dates back to the late 70s MIT CompSci/AI crowd. By the time I showed up there (early 80s) the term had broadened to mean anyone with exceptional real-time engineering skills of any kind. So a 'hacker' might be someone who could modify a standard sorting algorithm so half the code worked twice as fast, or a mechanical wizard who could fix a broken down motorcycle with parts she picked up at Star market.

The negative conotation of a hacker as someone who uses programming skills for malicious/clandestine purposes came later, and became the primary meaning in popular culture mostly as the result of (deliberate?) miscontruing by the press in the mid/late 80s - who probably heard the term used to describe a clever prank or practical joke (a correct, but secondary, usage), thought that this was the primary meaning, and then applied it to rude/criminal examples.

In nerdom, the retronym (often reluctantly used) for someone who breaks into other people's systems is 'cracker'.

I agree, using Waze is really helpful both for finding good routes (although Google Maps on my phone also is not afraid of shifting the route I am taking), and if I hit a standstill on the interstate Waze will tell me what's going on and how long it will take me to get through the problem area.

Trouble is, I can only really use Waze as a passenger, because the app drains my phone faster than any other app, about 1% a minute (so I usually see what's going on and then shut down the app). The easy solution is to get a car charger but I've been too lazy to do that yet. :)

Now, for the thousandth time on this site I will ask how many more years are we going to let this problem get worse before we build a real high speed rail system in the densest corner of this country?

I think you're going to have to ask a thousand-and-one times.

When do we get a train that goes the 200 miles from Boston to New York in 2 hours or less? Everyone realizes that other economically powerful nations (even marginal ones - I'm looking at you, Italy) already have trains capable of this, right?

It's true, but... Amtrak already basically sells out seating capacity on the existing once-per-hour trains that run from Boston to New York. It's getting to the point where you can't even buy cheap tickets 3 weeks in advance sometimes (they do the bucket pricing thing).

In comparison, the Tokaido Shinkansen is fast but it is also frequent, and that's even more important to moving large numbers of people. For example, between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. there are 10 different Shinkansen trains departing from Osaka to Tokyo. And it's still not enough -- they're building the Chuo maglev as a relief line (first to Nagoya)! The Shinkansen itself was considered a relief line back in 1964 as well.

Acela is basically a money-printing machine, so theoretically, increasing capacity is a no-brainer. Acela currently generates $308 million in profit ATR! 204% cost recovery rate! Even with its by-world-standards poor performance, the demand is there. People are practically throwing money at it. Amtrak is trying to upgrade capacity, slowly. In the past, they made poor decisions about train length and standards, resulting in the current capacity crunch. They are buying more vehicles but it'll be a while. Plus, there's some very problematic limitations on frequency caused by maritime traffic and movable bridges in Connecticut, as well as congestion on the rails from the also-extremely-busy Metro North. The highest level of demand comes from NY-DC, so the need is not as high in CT, but still.