How Does Google Traffic Work? How Does It Know Accidents and Other Happenings?

     Aren’t you thankful that you don’t have to turn on the radio and listen to the song you hate just to know the flow of traffic? Google Traffic is surely one of the most used Traffic update app used worldwide if not the most used. Google Traffic is a part of Google Maps or Maps- Navigation and Transit by Google LLC. Every time you leave from office or home to literally anywhere and use google maps or turn on GPS, you get a notification about the current condition of traffic around you. But, How does google get live traffic updates? Does they have a drone just monitoring traffic?

     Google Traffic has been around since February 28, 2007, which means 11 years. Google Maps is already the most used Map since February 8, 2005, which means 13 years. But, Google Traffic didn’t come into the scene until 2007, what took Google so long to integrate Traffic, Google Traffic into Maps? Well, to know that we shall dive into some history. Early version of Maps used to give user info about flow of traffic used on statistics and other factors. They would take in factors like day of the week, Month of the year and put together an assumption which was right more often than not.

     In 2004, Google acquired a company called ZipDash. ZipDash is a company focusing on real-time traffic analysis. Later in 2007, Google integrated ZipDash’s technology into Google Maps and started offering traffic data based on information used a whole different way. From then Google started calculating flow of traffic based on the movement of phones or people on the road using cell phone tower positioning and distance between them and other factors. This was back when GPS was not equipped in all phones.

     By 2011, U.S. Federal Communications Commissions required all new phones to be able to track accurately within 50 feet. Today, Google uses GPS-determined locations transmitted to Google by large number of Smartphone users and then analyses it to provide Traffic information. Google intelligently excludes irrelevant data of vehicles such as postal service vehicles which make frequent stops. Google sets different threshold of users on different types of road and when a particular threshold is reached Google updates the information and changes the colour on Maps.

     You can learn about Traffic by selecting ‘Traffic’ from the drop-down in Google Maps. Green colour represents normal flow of traffic, Red colour indicates congestion and Dark red indicates heavy traffic. A red and white dashed line indicates a road end or dead end. User can use search a particular area to be monitored other than theirs using the search bar. These are all the features introduced by ZipDash’s technology. Still, Google Traffic could not know the live happenings on the roads like accidents, Roadblocks, Construction, or just Animals on the road!

     It might or might not come to your surprise that a lot of that information comes from Waze- A app that is crowd-sourced to inform other users about live happenings on the road like accidents and even police checks. Waze was bought by Google in 2013 and integrated in Maps and is still available on Play store as an individual App. Not only Google doesn’t just rely on Waze but also picks up information from local government agencies responsible for transit, which is extra-helpful to provide information like schedule of constructions.

     All of this definitely provides you certain information. Possibly even more than you might need, making you feel like a news reporter, but all of this happens at the cost of privacy. There is no saying of what Google does of users Travel history. Google says it deletes user history permanently after a certain time but there is no actual conformation of that. Either way to read more of such informative articles and Tech news, Visit Rohan Wayangankar’s Blog.

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