glojo said:
Hi Philip,
Even my drug adled brain can understand your post. What you say certainly makes sense and patience is not my strongest virtue.
What are the benefits of TrafficMaster and what are the 'TMC' type improvements?
Thanks for taking the time to explain things,
John
Hi John, big answer coming because it’s Friday afternoon:
TrafficMaster uses those little boxes on the roadside to measure traffic speeds. Used to be blue, but now seem to be green (though the blue ones are still there, next to the green ones... Heaven knows what they all do). Because the boxes use number-plate recognition, they can calculate the exact average speed of an individual vehicle - because they measure a large number of vehicles simultaneously, the TrafficMaster data provides a very accurate indication of average road speed on a particular road segment for all vehicle types across all lanes (on multi-lane roads) indeed and is always bang up to date. The data is very much "real-time".
Traffic speed along a road segment is EXACTLY what a navigation system wants to know about. If you want to travel from Gloucester to London, you can choose the M4 or the A40/M40. If the nav system knows the traffic flow rates along both routes, then it can calculate the genuine, most efficient route, which may (of course) be the longer route in terms of distance.
Finally, waving TrafficMaster's flag, those guys have got awesome coverage. I think they have pretty much every A road and Motorway - and a number of other "strategically important" routes, too - completely covered. That means that if there is a problem at 3.00am in the morning on the A34040 in the middle of nowhere, TrafficMaster knows about it.
Now, I don't like blowing TrafficMaster’s trumpet because all of this valuable information is exclusive to them and they ******* [legally risky word deleted here] the government into giving them an "exclusive" on roadside measuring equipment years ago. TrafficMaster has milked its exclusivity well and truly, to the detriment of the British motorist and also to the detriment of the UK economy (think of all those wasted business hours, all those cars stuck in queues needlessly). But that exclusivity meant that ITIS (or any other potential competitor) needed to find an alternative method of traffic data collection to roadside monitoring equipment, and the reality is that for navigation systems, the TrafficMaster system is the best.
With no option on roadside monitoring, ITIS came up with "floating car data". This technology puts a GPS receiver and a transmitter into a number of vehicles on the British roads (currently about 50,000, I believe). The cars' progress along a road is measured and the data is transmitted back at regular intervals to a central data collation and processing station.
So, in theory, floating car data is doing the same job as the TrafficMaster cameras. But unfortunately, this is simply never going to be the case. Most importantly, you need a monitored vehicle to be on the A3404 at 3.00am in the morning in the middle of nowhere in order to gather flow data. Then, how do you know the monitoring vehicle hasn't pulled over for the driver to have a fag? Or that it hasn’t had a flat tyre, or any number of other reasons for slow progress along that road. I suppose that the system will dismiss the car flow data if it appears that the car has stopped of it’s own accord, but how often have you come up behind a tail-back and killed your engine because it’s going to be a long wait? That would then be valuable data. And what about when you are in a jam so you pull into the services as an alternative to sitting i nthe car?
Also, if there is a crash on the Motorway a couple of junctions in front of a monitored vehicle, that vehicle might well exit the motorway and head off across country, so the ability to measure the traffic flow through the incident is lost.
And so it goes on. I am sure you can imagine other scenarios in which reliable traffic flow data is hard to obtain from a floating car data model.
My final preference for TrafficMaster data is this: both companies use multiple databases for traffic reporting, a real-time database contains information on what is going on now, an historical database provides records of past traffic flow rates and this feeds the third database – a predictive database that tells you traffic conditions before they have even occurred. For example, if you are planning a route that will take you round the M25 at rush hour, you can predict that the traffic is going to be bad at that time, even if it is 2 O’clock now and everything is flowing well (mind you, I don’t know if anyone is doing this sort of dynamic guidance yet). Anyway, the point is – TrafficMaster have sooooo much more data at hand for predictive planning than IT IS simply because of their data gathering system design.
On top of all that, it is important to note that both companies also use incident data to round off their information offering. In the end, though, navigation systems like flow data best.
Finally (good, I hear you say!) on this subject, the Highways Agency was so miffed at being denied access to the TrafficMaster database - having granted TrafficMaster an exclusive licence (the Highways agency didn’t realise that exclusive meant that they wouldn’t get access to the data either!) - they started a vigorous programme of inserting induction loops onto the carriageways of all major roads as they came up for resurfacing. These induction loops also measure the real-time traffic flow and should match TrafficMaster data in terms of accuracy and volume of data collected. I
think this data is starting to make it out into the mainstream and that ITIS has access to it. – but I am only guessing that by reading websites and stuff. If that is the case, the coverage and quality of the ITIS data will be considerably enhanced and we will be laughing all the way along the open road in our MBs.
Philip
. I never kept the press release, but it looks like it depends on whose desk the letter lands on?
and liase with you.
(humour!! I accept there are no radio booster stations in mid-channel and the nearest French transmitter is way over the horizon) Can French TMC information be picked up by members that live near Dover?? 
