Google Maps Now Estimates Drive Time At Rush Hour
Aug 2, 2007 at 7:53am ET by Greg Sterling
According to the Google Lat Long Blog, the search engine has added a feature to Google Maps that provides a realistic estimate of drive time in traffic at peak times or when there’s an accident.
After you do a search for directions, you’ll see both an optimal drive time and an outer range.
For example, with this search for Newport Beach to downtown Los Angeles, you’re told in the left-hand column under “Drive:”
43.6 mi – about 52 mins up to 1 hour 40 mins in traffic
See the second line with the “in traffic” estimate?
It’s not clear how many people take those idealized travel time estimates seriously but this is an effort to be more realistic, which is helpful.
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Greg,
a href=”http://www.inrix.com”>Inrix is one of several providers of real time traffic providers/aggregators and they also traffic predictions.
Inrix technology is used with many GPS devices that offer real time traffic like Telenav, TomTom, and others. Inrix comes from Microsoft Research.
The have a bit more about their traffic prediction technology http://www.inrix.com/pdf/Inrix%20Dynamic%20Predictive%20Traffic%20Service%20-%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf.
Greg:
Forgot to mention that you can get an idea of Inrix “predictive” technology in action via BeatTheTraffic.com.
Estimates for the for the SF Bay Area from BeatTheTraffic.com
Estimates for NYC metro from BeattheTraffic.com
Estimates for Orange County, CA from BeattheTraffic.com
Other companies in this space are LandSonar and TrafficCast.
You can try a demo of their technology (via RouteCast, a LandSonar user) here on the WRAL web site in Raleigh-Durham, NC. I would bet it’s there, somewhere, but I was unable to find any predictive info.
What I think is most useful here (it’s also available on SkylineGlobe. is the embedding of live traffic cams in the map.
Finally, TrafficCast is also working in China and developing the “world largest” network of celluar probes in Shanghai.