Traffic Monitoring

I love Bing maps' traffic. It decides when I leave work to avoid any pain and suffering. But I want more. I was wondering if anyone knew of a service that takes snapshots of traffic patterns (Green, Yellow, Red, Black) every minute of every day. This data could be used to show history patterns, of what gets congested at what time.

Traffic.com doesn't seem to, bing maps doesn't, neither does Google. Does anything?

Nothing comes to my mind. It is hard to do this analysis because a single crash would crap out the traffic for the entire day, especially for 405 and 5. Should you consider that as noise when crash happens fairly frequently? Not only that, the entire freeway network is affected by that crash. Often a freeway is stuck because of the ramp, not the freeway itself.

Based on the rate of crash, I would expect it to happen everyday, the question is where the crash is.

@magicalclick: That's why having this kind of data would be really cool, because you could examine all of those what-if scenarios.

Traffic is very much like a fluid. I find interesting the kinds of things that you see once you start looking at if from a high level views. One of the most interesting things is how it reacts to different situations. For example, the one or more people will see something that causes them to take their foot off the gas. The people behind them tap their brake. The next group steps on their brake for a second or two. This effect ripples back along the stream of traffic gaining strength until a mile or two back you have heavy slow moving traffic. Eventually the wave passes and things clear up. That's why you can be in the middle of a mass of slow moving cars and suddenly everything is clear up ahead.

I have the feeling that if you had granular enough traffic density data, you would see that a city looks like the surface of a pond. You'd have small waves moving around at random, with larger splashes sending out concentric ripples when accidents or other events occur.

@intelman: Ex MS Employee?

How about creating a crowd source application for your mobile phone? It would monitor your speed using the GPS radio and then transmit the data to a server in the background periodically. Everybody running the app would contribute to the accuracy of the data and would likewise benefit by seeing the slow areas overlaid onto a map. You'd have the option of overlaying the current traffic speeds onto the map or overlaying the historical speeds at specific times of the day.

Inrix does it (worldwide), but it's clearly part of their business advantage in the market.