Google Wants You to Share Traffic Movement Data

Not only is Google now helping commuters and those snagged in traffic jams find quicker ways home thanks to new map features, as reported by Tonic's Steve Tanner; it's also hoping those same commuters will chime in to provide better and more accurate traffic jam data.

Here's the come-on Google's blog offered up on Tuesday:

"What if you could do a little something to improve the world during your daily drive to work? Here are a few ideas: tell everybody in the city when you're stuck in slow-moving traffic; warn the drivers on the freeway behind you that they should consider an alternate route; tell the people still at home that they should spend another ten minutes reading the morning news before they leave for work; tell your city government that they might want to change the timing of that traffic light at the highway on-ramp."

All you need to do, if you're using Google Maps for mobile with GPS working on that snazzy smartphone, is to enable the "My Location" feature. This way your smartphone (traveling in your car) provides data to Google about how fast you're going which helps them provide an overview of other phone movements in that transportation area.

"When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody," blogs Dave Barth, product manager for Google Maps.

Barth noted the user interaction aspect is the technology that Google loves because of the power it can create.

"...It's so easy for a single person to help out, but can be incredibly powerful when a lot of people use it together. Imagine if you knew the exact traffic speed on every road in the city — every intersection, backstreet and freeway on-ramp — and how that would affect the way you drive, help the environment and impact the way our government makes road planning decisions," he blogged.

Barth reiterates that Google only uses anonymous speed and location information to determine traffic conditions, so drivers won't be hearing sirens after reporting speed data to Google. The search giant even goes as far as deleting the start and end points from vehicle data so that no one knows the activity of any one vehicle. And if you want to opt out, you can.

Photo courtesy of Google