Comment by dmfdmf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmfdmf | Hacker News Reader

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I'd like to see a website where I can enter my home address and work address and it will generate a chart of leave and arrival times for each day of the week based on prevailing and constantly measured and updated typical traffic patterns with accident-jams removed. In my experience traffic patterns, even without accidents, are highly non-linear and leaving 10 minutes early or later can drastically reduce your drive time. You could even have it rank different routes so that on any given day of the week you might take a different route and leave at a different time to minimize your drive time and increase the probability of arriving on time.

Metering lights have their use but are limited in how long they can hold up a car whereas if I am at home or work its no problem to adjust my schedule +/- 10 minutes or more to avoid a jam. As more people signed up for such a site it would also become more efficient since it could take into account where and when people actually want to go in its planning calcs.

I wanted an app to do this, and just let me know when it was going to take less than x minutes to get to work/home. The simplest workaround was to bookmark Google Maps directions, so a single click would tell me the expected time with traffic. I saved it as an Android bookmark as well, so I could single tap it from there, too.

This works ok if you're interested in waiting until after traffic, and not "beating" traffic. In my situation, under x minutes meant leaving at 5:30am or after 9;30am, and going home before 3:00pm or after 7:00pm, so that was fine. YMMV.

Google Now is somewhere close to this, but I've found it finnicky. Maybe because of my more flexible schedule was throwing off its ability to predict my commutes. I would have preferred something more explicit for work hours, than it guessing based on my GPS'd habits.

I was hoping for a solution that can solve (or at least minimize) the problem between 6-9am and 4-7pm. I think there are a lot of short-lived local effects that can be avoided. For instance near my office is a government agency that quits work right at 5pm on the nose. If I leave one minute before 5pm it is smooth sailing, one minute after 5pm and traffic is snarled until 5:30pm or so. Also, as far as general commuting, the school start times are one major effect since these are local and hard set arrival times for the parents. A smart database could calculate these effects and other cross-interactions that really impact jams so a small change with x% of drivers can prevent avoid the log-jams or backups that take time to dissipate once they form. Perhaps the data could even be used to get schools with interfering traffic patterns to stagger their start time 30 minutes which could have a huge impact.

Have you seen the Nokia Transit app? I don't use it, so I'm not sure. But from the last time I've played with a demo of it, it seems it might be helpful to you. I think it only runs on Windows Phone though (no website).

The problem with any such site is that if it became sufficiently popular it would result in feedback effects that might destroy its predictions.

Or it could do better -- dispense predictions/instructions so as to ensure an even distribution of traffic (e.g. by randomization).

An unethical freemium model for such a site: dispense instructions to ensure an even distribution of traffic to free users, but provide a purely optimal path for paying users, perhaps even making suggestions to free users to move them out of the way.

I wouldn't call that unethical - even free users would benefit from such a system, in the same way that non-users would also benefit, but paying users would benefit even more.

The system actually requires itself to be ethical. The ability to make things better for the paying users is dependant on the system having a lot of free users. Those free users have to be getting some utility out of the site, otherwise they won't use it. And without large numbers of free users, the paying services can't be offered!

True. But if it got that popular it could then be used to optimize the schedule road use of all the participants taking everyone's situation into account. It would probably be even MORE efficient at finding semi-optimal travel schedules for most users. It couldn't be a static database it would have to constantly revised as road usage changed even in response to its own calcs.

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