Avoiding traffic jams

Going beyond smart parking meters, a software application looks at your personal travel patterns over a period of time and makes predictions about the best way to get to where you are going. “According to Fast Company’s Ariel Schwartz, ‘Instead of slogging through the traffic, your phone recommends that you drive halfway to work, park in the BART parking lot, and take the subway system the rest of the way. If you leave now, you’ll make your way through traffic just in time to catch the next train to work.’
“John Day, an IBM Researcher working on the project, emphasizes the predictive aspect of the technology as its main advantage in comparison to other traffic information in the industry. ‘GPS-equipped mobile devices can give us up-to-minute traffic information, which is great sometimes, but what we really care about, what we really focused on in the Smarter Traveler project was getting that information 30 or 40 minutes in advance rather than waiting until you’re already stuck in traffic,’ Day says in a video interview.” Read more at TheCityFix.