1. Do they use satellite images?
2. are there other services that do the same thing?
3. How do they get the data about public transits?
In: Technology
From other devices. That’s why there was a guy (might have been here in Australia but can’t remember) who altered traffic conditions by riding a bike with a hundred phones in a basket. Google saw it as congestion, started advising people to avoid the area.
Edit: it was in Germany and he was walking, but the point stands. He was an artist, and walked it past the Google headquarters over there.
Many people turn on location services most of the time. Eg: Google pay in India works only when GPS is on.
The traffic data is obtained by tracking the individuals. With the speed of movement and number of similar individuals in the location with the spacing between each individuals, we can get information like:
Are they in a car or bus or walking
How congested is the traffic is
1 Yes they use satellite images for maps and telecom locations for accurate locations of the subjects.
2 Since Google has most of the data and everything is easily accessible (free), there isn’t much competition.
3 most people has android phones with location services turned on and other publicly available info with people sharing the information too. Like review and operating times are shared by fellow users.
I think that is mostly based on other users using the same (or cooperating) apps.
If for a given road suddenly all maps users are very slowly moving, there has to be a traffic jam.
In addition they can probably add manually from news sources.
>Do they use satellite images?
>are there other services that do the same thing?
>How do they get the data about public transits?
They might do all these things but I don’t see why they’d have to. They basically have real-time location data of everyone on this planet using an Android device or a Google app with location services. You don’t really need anything else to generate your own high-quality traffic data.
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Yeah mate, I’m guessing it’s an algorithm for the calculations, like 1 slow phone is a walker but a series of phones going fast then slowing down at the same point is congestion. I believe if your location data is on Google maps uses it (if you have the permission allowed)
Yeah mate, I’m guessing it’s an algorithm for the calculations, like 1 slow phone is a walker but a series of phones going fast then slowing down at the same point is congestion. I believe if your location data is on Google maps uses it (if you have the permission allowed)
There was a guy who caused it to show a traffic jam by slowly walking across a bridge with a bunch of mobile phones in a cart.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-04/man-creates-fake-traffic-jam-on-google-maps-by-carting-99-phones/11929136
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