In an interesting use of mostly existing technology, companies have begun reporting on street traffic based on data received from vehicle GPS units. Just recently, 16 states along I-95 spent $5 million to provide this capability to both motorists and government users. I had been aware that this was already among many technologies available, and had even been used in a few projects (on a smaller scale than the I-95 project), but what surprised me most from this article was the fact that there are a dozen companies all exploring this approach to providing traffic data.

What I like the most about this is how well the effect scales up — for example, with only one or two motorists every 20 miles or so you can provide thousands of people with a fairly decent picture of how well traffic is moving along the interstate. As the number of vehicles providing data goes up, that figure gets more and more accurate. I would expect you’d see the same effect as in random polling, where an impressively small number of samples can give you a surprisingly accurate result.

One day, this will be nothing more than just another input into the fully automated cars which will all be driving us to work. Until then… keep listening to the traffic reports.