http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/industries/
automotive/14692916.htm
Posted on Mon, May. 29, 2006
Navigation Nation
THOUSANDS OF CARS WILL REPORT ON TRAFFIC TO ENABLE THOUSANDS OF OTHER
CARS TO AVOID JAMS -- IF COMPANY'S PLANS COME TO FRUITION
By Matt Nauman
Mercury News
A new kind of traffic report, combining real-time GPS data from
vehicles on the road with predictions of traffic jams before they
happen, is coming soon to major U.S. cities, including San Jose.
The result could be navigation systems that give drivers far more
advance warning to avoid choke points on the road -- before they get
trapped.
Inrix, a Microsoft spin-off, will deliver traffic information
gathered from more than a half-million ``sentinel'' commercial
vehicles, equipped with GPS locators, to improve the speed and
accuracy of its traffic-flow information, company representatives
said last week.
That should help drivers nationwide, including Bryan Mistele, Inrix's
president and chief executive.
When Mistele gets into his car each morning, he glances at his mobile
navigation device. It always tells him it'll take 15 minutes for him
to get from his home to his office in Kirkland, Wash.
But it almost always takes him 45 minutes.
That's because most navigation devices, whether embedded in a car or
a portable model, rely on distance and official speed limits to
determine travel times.
The real world doesn't work that way. Accidents, construction and
other drivers -- lots of other drivers -- get in the way.
But Inrix's plan to obtain GPS, or global positioning satellite, data
from commercial vehicle fleets should update traffic reports much
more quickly and accurately, the company says.
By year's end, the information from these vehicles will provide real-
time traffic data for 50 major U.S. cities and cover 35,000 miles of
roads, said Mistele.
``This is quite dramatic,'' said Mistele. ``Right now, there's only
about 5,000 miles of road that have coverage today.''
Mistele talks about making traffic data ``personally relevant.''
If you're sitting in your office right now, you probably don't care
about how bad traffic is on Highway 101, he said. ``But you care
about what time do you need to leave work to get to your kid's ball
game tonight at 6 o'clock,'' he said. ``Making routing calculations,
time estimations personally relevant is critical.''
Inrix aggregates, processes and distributes information to companies
that give it or sell it to consumers. Those include a Web site
(Microsoft MSN), a cellular company (Cingular) and a maker of mobile
navigation devices (TomTom), said Mistele. In all, the company has 20
clients, but he would only name those three.
Thilo Koslowski, a vice president at the Gartner research firm in San
Jose, said 5 million to 6 million navigation units were sold in the
United States in 2005, and that business continues to grow.
Still, the applications that combine real-time traffic data with
navigational maps are few.
``At the point you step in your car, half the time it's too late,''
he said.
But a device that would tell you that you needed to leave 10 minutes
earlier due to traffic, that you could leverage outside your car,
``now that would be valuable,'' he said. ``At that point, traffic and
navigation becomes something you can use, a time-management tool.''
Inrix's Dust Network, as it describes its gathering of speed and
location data from GPS-equipped fleet vehicles, will benefit 5
million Americans by the end of August and 10 million by year's end,
a company spokesman said.
Koslowski characterized the Inrix news as ``pretty significant.''
``This is the first time in the United States we're looking at using
floating car data for traffic reporting,'' he said.
That's important, since the accuracy, timeliness and thoroughness of
traffic data is the key to its usefulness.
What has really limited the arrival and acceptance of real-time
traffic has been geographic coverage, Mistele aid. ``How do you truly
get true nationwide coverage without spending a billion dollars
putting road sensors into all the roads?'' he asked.
The Bay Area is lucky to have many sensors in its roads, plus FasTrak
toll tags, traffic cameras and some radar-like devices that measure
road speeds. Other major metropolitan areas have much less.
``There are no road sensors in Miami, or San Antonio, or
Providence,'' he said.
But thousands of fleet vehicles, driving the roads of those cities,
and transmitting data showing where they are and how fast they're
moving, provide a solution.
``We're not the first ones to think of using GPS data and turning it
into traffic,'' Mistele said. ``We're the first one to do it on a
nationwide basis.''
Bay Area drivers will benefit, Mistele said. The Inrix network will
provide traffic information on surface streets, as opposed to just
major highways (such as 101, 880, 80 and 680).
He mentioned El Camino Real, Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park and the
Embarcadero in San Francisco as examples.
Now, Inrix has real-time traffic data for 10,000 miles of roads in 30
markets. As more of its fleets begin transmitting data, Mistele said,
that network will grow to 25,000 miles of roads in 40 markets by late
summer and 35,000 miles of roads in 50 markets by the end of 2006.
Inrix announced last year that it also sells predictive data to its
customers. Using school, sports and events calendars combined with
historical data, the company offers a projection of future traffic
flow. Information ranges from the legislative calendar in Washington,
D.C., to local holidays.
``We can very accurately predict what traffic will look like a
minute, a week, a month ahead of time,'' Mistele said.
That's important to commercial fleets, as they decide how many trucks
to use tomorrow, or how long of a route each truck can cover.
But it can be useful to a consumer, too.
Inrix recently partnered with TeleAtlas, a mapping company with
offices in Menlo Park, to further connect navigation and traffic.
They're working together now to provide traffic flow and incident
data. The Dust Network is ``a great big step,'' said Al Cooley,
TeleAtlas' director of tools and services.
An Inrix rival, traffic.com, based in Wayne, Penn., said in March
that it would begin using anonymous cell-phone location data to
provide speed and travel time information in Salt Lake City.
A news release described the cell-phone data as a complement to
traffic.com's data collection methods including its own wireless
digital traffic sensors and those owned by the government, toll tags
and ``GPS-derived data.''
Besides offering a Web site that offers free customized traffic data,
including phone and e-mail alerts, traffic.com provides traffic data
on 35 cities to television and radio stations, Microsoft, The Weather
Channel and XM Satellite Radio.
Mistele said Inrix is studying the use of cell phone data, too, but
privacy issues must be faced. The drivers of fleet vehicles already
know they're being tracked by the companies that own those vehicles.
Contact Matt Nauman at [EMAIL PROTECTED] or (408) 920-5701.
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