Google Maps has made traffic information available to many US cities for a long time but it is only within the last year that Canada has started to see traffic information for major cities. As I began to use the live traffic feature more often, I started to think about how Google could gather accurate traffic data in real time.
Here is an example of the live traffic data overlayed on a regular Google Map. Pretty cool stuff.
In order for Google to collect such massive amounts of traffic data I assumed they must have set up a very large and expensive network of sensors near roadways that kept track of changing traffic conditions. But I was wrong. It turns out that, as usual, Google has devised a much more innovative solution that costs a hell of a lot less than what I had envisioned.
I will let Google describe their solution with the following excerpt that was taken from the Official Google Blog. This is how Google can track traffic flow on various roads.
If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that’s exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions.
We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.
Well that makes sense to me but I would have never thought of that. Google is using their own Google Maps for mobile application that is freely available on millions of phones. All you have to do is consider the many iPhone users utilizing Google Maps to get an idea of how this process works. The individual phones get their location and speed information from GPS chips embedded in the phones and can send that information back to Google servers. Google can then aggregate the information from lots of phones to formulate an idea of how traffic is moving along a specific road. Thankfully Google can also weed out the non-sense type of data such as someone walking on a sidewalk that could potentially mess up the traffic flow estimates.
As smartphones become more and more popular it seems fitting that Google has found a way to exploit this in order to bring an amazing new service to its already feature rich Google Maps experience.
