Ok, Google! Navigate me.
Two months ago, while making my way through the dreaded Bengaluru traffic along with my friend, we had a conversation.
Me: “ Hey! Could you please check if we have to head straight to Koramangala?”
She: “Yeah, sure. Hold on!”
She takes her phone out carefully, as I slow down to not go the wrong way at the diversion.
She: “Ok, Google! Navigate me to Koramangala.”
A slight beep and the map opens up with a route highlighted.
She: “Dude, Google is suggesting to take the left turn, for it will be a faster route.”
I was taken aback for a moment. Despite sounding a bit confused, taking the straight road was pretty much the norm, but this incident forced me to go along the road less preferred.
Me: “Okay, that’s interesting, how Google affects how we reach our destination as well”
She: “Hm! Indeed, it has tremendous live data to be able to do. Bit scary, but helps us right?.”
Me: “Just think of this, along with us, in the next few minutes, tens of vehicles must have checked the maps and turned along this path, hence leading to congestion.”
She: “Hm! And in turn, Google would suggest the next few vehicles take the alternate path.”
Me: “Yeah!… Wow… We have a traffic management system in hand.”
Well, no complaints against Google, we did reach the place before the expected time and the discussion got lost as we caught with our college friend ;)
Just like how a Load Balancer distributes incoming server requests between various servers, with Google maps in place, incoming vehicles can be routed across multiple routes to ensure none of the routes is jam-packed.
While this might sound like a trivial example, we can think of some interesting use cases.
Use 1: Dynamic Road Direction Boards
Direction Boards are a common instalment at major junctions across cities.
These are usually the shortest distance paths and often might lead to congestion if many people are heading in directions.
Inclusion of such dynamic boards would help in improving the traffic situation by expecting traffic to adopt the route as mentioned.
While this is just an on-the-top of the head idea, we would require a lot more user statistics to see if people prefer looking at these boards, would they follow the suggested route and so on.
Fast Forward
After this initial thought dispersed, I continued to travel between places, got stuck in traffic jams and even got drenched in rain during such jams.
As I scrolled through, the seemingly infinite posts on, Facebook, I came across a post which reminded of the earlier conversation.
When Google “innocently,” asked you if you would want to grant, Google maps, access to GPS. If you had said “Yes” then you’re GPS data is being tracked along with millions of other people’s GPS coordinates, to build this accurate tracking of live traffic conditions.
Data privacy and ethics aside ( It’s a whole other topic of discussion, that’s not the point here), the live traffic feature and more recently live speed feature of google maps are a very good product features in terms of how it’s implemented by plotting GPS coordinates for traffic and change in coordinates over time for live speed.
Now, this is another extension of the same GPS data that’s in place to plot the traffic at a given place, being used to determine the signal timings.
Simply put, at normal traffic, if a signal is timed at 15 seconds then at high traffic it would be 45 seconds. If one route is clogged even further, then that specific route can have a signal for 60 seconds.
All these timings can be altered almost at an instant.
What next?
With this mock implementation, it can be easily expanded to most of the electronic signals in place at major junctions.
It’s pretty much a reality that we do have signals which are manned by traffic police.
A personal observation was, police had to decide by their intuition as to how much time should they allow one route to pass through.
This leads to a lot of mess with all the vehicles in each of routes, blaring their horns to show their resentment.
It’s an interesting case to study upon and come up with a system to help the manned signals and manage traffic.
A mobile app integrating google maps with live traffic data and suggesting the time given to each route would make it a handy solution at manned signals.
Would love to hear some cases and situations and how such technology can be used to improve the traffic situation.
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