TRAFFIC CONGESTION AND COMMUTING ROUTES.

Getting to work early in the morning can be an herculean task for many people who have to commute for 3-4 hours before they get to work because of congestion issues,fuel crisis and basically because most people face a particular direction everyday,thus choking the routes because everybody wants to beat traffic. The funny aspect is everybody is moving about the same time and singing the same song" i want to beat traffic" guess what?? we all are the traffic,and the earlier we all change routes/schedules or motoring style we are all going to do this for a long time. A recent study tagged Understanding congested travel in urban areas, by Serdar Çolak, Antonio Lima and Marta C. González examined the way drivers travel between points in Boston and San Francisco Bay Area in the United States, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and Lisbon and Porto in Portugal. This paper was recently published and mind boggling;they used road map data provided by local authorities and OpenStreetMap to analyse the journeys of millions of road users based on huge mobile phone data sets known as CDRs. Individuals can be identified from CDR data by a hashed user identification string, and their regular movements and timestamps can be used to identify the start and end points of regular journeys. The team used this information to model the way drivers select routes in large cities. They found that drivers were increasingly using real-time data from GPS devices to move faster. But as access to real-time traffic information is not coordinated between different services and users, this result in a "suboptimal system", the researchers explained. "Smartphone apps could offer points and vouchers to drivers who are willing to take longer routes that avoid congested areas"Antonio Lima and Marta C. González states their study indicates "that on average 15–30 percent of total minutes lost in congestion is caused solely by selfish routing." When they modelled how traffic would flow if city residents used socially-aware routing to reduce average travel times for everyone. Individual drivers would only see marginal time improvements of between one and three minutes on most short urban journeys, but the researchers found that 30 percent less time would be lost to congestion across an entire city. Urban congestion often involves a staggering number of factors, particularly where multi-mode journeys, such as those going from car, to train, to foot, intersect, as illustrated by a recent study suggesting that slowing down London's tube network could improve journey times across the city due to bottlenecks resulting from the tube being faster than road traffic. It's also not clear how much of a difference improving private vehicle congestion by encouraging optimal routing would make when compared to improving public transport, cycling and pedestrian facilities. However, the rise of autonomous vehicles could mean that one day, our cars will work out their own preferred routes for the good of the transport system, and leave us to think about other things entirely. read more at Wired.co.uk. Monday morning traffic # traffic congestion # chocked drive routes # phone apps # technology # self-driving cars.