My wife and I left San Jose a little after 7 this evening, heading for Sacramento, where we are teaching at an SCA event tomorrow. In planning the trip—including stops going, coming, or both to visit my grandchildren in Berkeley and my sister's in Davis—one important question was when traffic would be heavy, what time rush hour starts and ends on the relevant highway on a Friday in November.
My Android phone shows me current traffic conditions, but the designers carelessly neglected to attach a time machine, so I did not have the option of seeing today's information yesterday or the day before. Someone should correct that omission. There is no way of knowing for certain what traffic will be like this Friday, but what traffic was like last Friday, and the Friday before, and the same time of year last year and the year before, are all public information. By combining information of that sort with sophisticated statistical analysis, it should be possible to make a pretty good prediction of future traffic a day, a week, even a year in advance.
What I am imagining is a web page that looks very much like the Google Maps picture on my phone, with the traffic layer selected. The only addition would be the ability to set date and time.
Does it already exist somewhere?
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