Visions Of Congestion Relief
Oliver B.Patton
Washington Editor
Your customer is expecting his cargo, but traffic is getting thicker and you don't know whether to wait it out or take a chance on an unfamiliar route. What do you do?
Simple: Order your cell phone to tell you what the traffic is like ahead and on any alternative routes, and then give you travel times, a map and voice directions.
You can approximate this with some onboard GPS-linked traffic systems available today, but they are not quite what Alain Kornhauser, founder of ALK Technologies, has in mind. Kornhauser and his team at ALK have a vision of what they call "the Holy Grail of trucking" – perhaps an exaggeration but what the heck – in which national real-time traffic information, generated by GPS users themselves, informs truck routing decisions from moment to moment in a way that is practical and easy for a driver to use.
He calls it Optimized Estimated Time of Arrival.
"To me the problem with the current offerings in real-time traffic (reporting) is that somebody has to sit there and look at a map," Kornhauser says. "Ninety-nine percent of people are just clueless about what to do about it."
ALK already has a family of products, under the name Co-Pilot, that integrate GPS with routing and mapping systems that can be received via an onboard computer or a cell phone. With Co-Pilot a driver can get vocal turn-by-turn directions and a map based on his location at any given moment. Now Kornhauser wants to add the traffic component with information gathered directly and automatically from vehicles that are on the road.
With onboard GPS, it is possible to determine the speed of the vehicle over the road. ALK demonstrated this in a project last year: 250 drivers in Troy, N.Y., volunteered to use Co-Pilot in their commute to and from work. Using highway segments defined by "virtual monuments" – latitude and longitude positions – the system calculated travel time and, in effect, traffic density.
Kornhauser, who besides being the founder of ALK is a professor at Princeton University, determined that if he can collect speed data on as little as 1 percent of the vehicles in a given area, he can calculate an accurate, real-time picture of how quickly traffic is moving. He could start to deliver benefits with a smaller penetration – a 10th or even a 100th of a percent – but with 1 percent, he says he can get a picture of traffic movement on secondary roads as well as Interstates.
The problem is that while 1 percent is a small percentage, it is a large number of vehicles that would have to be GPS-equipped and willing to participate – far more than now use Co-Pilot.
So this is not a product that will be on the market any time soon. But Kornhauser is pushing ahead. ALK will propose a statewide demonstration in New York, and has begun discussions with truck fleets that might be interested in this type of service.
"A major carrier or group of smaller carriers together that are willing to share this information is another way of doing it," Kornhauser says.
One barrier is concern about privacy. "The key element is to ensure that you don't know who is providing the information and you have no way to trace it," he says. "Actually, we don't even want the information because we're not smart enough to do anything with it."
He also suggests another way of gathering the key travel time information: through the cell phone system. As a cell carrier hands off a phone from one tower to the next, it records the transfer, which creates time and distance data that can be analyzed to determine speed. Kornhauser views this as an interim step, because "there is a lot of noise in the data." But if cell carriers could be convinced to make the data available, it is a good thing to pursue, he says.
"The idea has been around for a long time. It's just that now I think the technology is really there. It's actually doable. The whole issue that we still have to figure out is how do we do the penetration of the satellite navigation assets."
Meanwhile, early adopters of technology have the option of buying off-the-shelf GPS navigation devices and subscribing to traffic services offered by a company called traffic.com.
Traffic.com supplies traffic information from 40 major cities to a variety of markets, including the handheld or dash-mounted satellite navigation systems that consumers can buy at stores such as Circuit City and Best Buy. Sales of these devices – the Garmin Street Pilot and the Pioneer GPS Navigation, for example – jumped by 100 percent in the past year, says Christopher M. Rothey, chief operating officer of traffic.com. "The devices are there and the price points are coming down," he says.
Traffic.com gets information from some state and local highway agencies – toll plazas, for example – as well as roadside sensors. The information flows through traffic monitoring centers and is distributed to customers such as satellite navigation suppliers, broadcast companies and the government.
Rothey says some limo fleets have started using this arrangement for their dispatch operations, but truck lines are mainly sticking to the free traffic reporting services available through the traffic.com web site.
