Wednesday, August 1, 2007

C'mon Google, seriously?

Mapperz Blog, a must read recently btw, reports on Google new to estimate traffic in their driving directions time estimate. Read the article here. How many layers of estimated data can be piled upon each other before people just start completely ignoring results? Let's see, we have the original street network geometry (1), the individual cells classifications (2), the speeds assigned to the classifications (3), the routing optimization methods (4), and now traffic volume estimates (6). If you roll a dice six times and add the total what do you get? Could be anything from 6 to 36. The answer is 21 then right? It halfway between the two possible extremes. What if I knew the first of the six dice was 5? Then the "answer" is 22.5 and somehow people think my guess is really good? I don't get it. Drivetime data sucks. Get over it people. Two people leaving the same spot at the same time don't even take the same amount of time to travel. You think some software can tell you what travel time will be?

Alright I'm done. I'm going to the beach to relax, apparently I need it...

1 comment:

Mapperz said...

Drive Time Polygons would be the next stage... but that is some serious geoprocessing in the backend server.

Nice Monkey

Mapperz
http://mapperz.blogspot.com/