Once again I have been foiled by my own apathy. Brandon Hanson has posted an article titled Beating Traffic at OmniNerd (no affiliation with the defunct Omnipotent Creations or my markomni nickname). Since I was in college, I have wondered just how much time you could save by driving a little faster or choosing a different route when commuting from place to place. I have gone so far as to want to compile information about my commute to map out the best times and routes to take in the morning and evening to have the shortest commute times.
Obviously this is less of a concern for me now that I work 5 minutes away from home, as opposed to 30 minutes. While I was working at PHS, I informally took note of commute times. I kept track of times I left work or home, the time it takes to travel from one point to another on a street, and average stop times at intersections. While I took into account extra information that Hanson did not, he took into account plenty of other information for his analysis, including day of week, week of month and whether or not the local school district was in session. That last one I sort of kept track of, of course, being that I work in a school.
I haven’t completed reading his analysis, but it looks interesting. I am convinced that such analysis of traffic patterns can lead to better driving directions when using a computerized map, such as Mapquest and Google Maps. I would need more travel time data in order to put together such a service, so we’ll see if I’ll ever find the time to do that.
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