Smart navigation tools pretty dumb
By adamg - 10/2/09 - 8:07 am
Andy Watson is selling his condo in Roslindale. But he has a problem: The condo is near the route of Sunday's Roslindale Day Parade - and his open house is scheduled for the same day. He tries to find online tools that would help him plot out routes for potential buyers that don't involve getting waylaid by parade-related street closings. Has no luck. In the end, he resorts to old-fashioned e-mail.
Comments
Many of his issues are with
Many of his issues are with the parade itself, how is google maps supposed to know that their is a parade and what the route is?
New GPS tools are being developed that will collect information from users in real time and send them to a central database which will be able to figure out that nobody is driving down that main road and will also be able to figure out how people are getting around the obstruction. There will also be the ability to look at historical data over time, so it will become obvious that the first Sunday of every October this road has issues.
This is a problem of data collection. Data can not be presented if it is not collected. Data collection is a long and tedious task and is pretty much useless unless you obtain large data sets. For instance if every street on the grid is included on my map except for two side streets I needed help with then the program is useless for me and everyone else that needs those streets.
With so many smart phones and GPS devises on the road we now have the technology, it is only a matter of getting us all to input the data.
why not create your own
why not create your own google map for multiple major routes?
The bigger problem
FHA changed their requirements for condos on October 1st and will no longer give mortgages to condos with fewer than three units. All converted two families are now off limits to anyone who does not have 20 percent down required with a conventional mortgage.
I just made one for my own needs
But it helped considerably that I already knew the route. And it doesn't address actual street closings beyond the actual parade route.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=Washington+St.+%26+Bexley+Rd,+Roslindale,+MA&daddr=Roslindale+Village+Train+station,+Roslindale,+MA+to:Belgrade+Ave+%26+W+Roxbury+Parkway,+Roslindale,+MA+to:W+Roxbury+Pkwy+%26+Centre+Street,+Boston,+MA+02132+to:Centre+St+%26+South+St.,+Roslindale,+MA+to:South+St.+%26+Robert+St.,+Roslindale,+MA&hl=en&geocode=&mra=ls&dirflg=w&sll=42.287183,-71.137118&sspn=0.018319,0.033002&ie=UTF8&z=15
If you know what streets you want to avoid ...
... you can drag the Google Maps route away from those streets and force it to come up with less-direct alternatives.