Nathan Yau points out to this interactive map showing county-level commute time estimates for 2011 in the US. The data source is the American Community Survey organized by the United States Census Bureau. Pretty good job!
Now imagine if you could have acess to real time data on traffic conditions on arterial roads in several cities around the globe. There is one company that generates these data. I know what you're thinking: "Damn these guys from Google are awesome!"
Acutally this is not a new project. Google has started it aroud 2009 and now it covers. several cities around the globe. They basically track anonymous locations from smartphones to gauge traffic conditions in real time:
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.
The Google Maps Traffic Layer (web version) also inclues traffic prediction for any day of the week and time of the day, based on past conditions. Neat! Now it should be very interesting to compare/validate Google's traffic data to "real data" from more traditional sources.
Any volunteers?
