You're in your car on US 101, unaware of why traffic is snarled. Tuning into the latest traffic advisories on AM radio is only mildly comforting: You might learn the cause of the jam - if you're lucky enough to be on the stretch of highway covered in that quarter-hour's report.
The thing commuters need is access to the traffic information that matters to them, says Larry Sweeney. One way to do that is through the Web, as Etak has done with its demonstration site to give real-time traffic data to commuters in the San Francisco Bay Area.
"Radio has only one minute every 10 minutes or so to give a report, and they can't cover everything. We can give people all the traffic reports all of the time," said Sweeney, vice president and general manager of the advanced development center for Etak.
Etak's site is but one piece of a bigger transit resources puzzle that federal, state, and local governments - with the help of private industry - have spent nearly US$9 million to solve. Namely, how can commuters use their existing transportation resources wisely. This project, TravInfo, takes data from California Highway Patrol dispatch services and information the California Department of Transportation gathers from pavement-embedded sensors, freeway-trained video cameras, and other sources.
Etak's Web site feeds on the data from TravInfo and is updated every minute, Sweeney said. So commuters can log onto the Web from home or office to see how their route is moving before they get on the road. For example, a commuter who travels from San Francisco to Oakland could select the East Bay region to see a detail map of the travel route. Each traffic problem is denoted by a diamond-shaped yellow sign. By clicking on these signs, commuters can learn what the cause of the traffic problem is and receive an estimate of when it will clear up.
The next step is a nationwide rollout of this Web-based traffic data, but Etak won't stop there. Sweeney says the Web proved to be the most logical place to start, as it has the potential to reach the most users as compared to the navigation systems being installed in top-of-the-line luxury cars. "These are expensive and not widely used," he said.
Devices from television sets wired for cable on down to handheld and pocket-borne gizmos such as pagers will eventually become part of the TravInfo fold - at least as far as Etak is concerned.
Commuters will eventually develop a driving information account with Etak, registering their travel routes and drive times. The system can send email and pages to alert commuters of problems in advance of their departures.
The four-year-old TravInfo project will serve as the data hub for services such as Etak's, all of which are geared toward making transit more efficient and pleasant.
"It's getting harder to build new highways and transit systems," said Michael Berman, assistant project manager for TravInfo. "Our emphasis is to develop ways to use what we have in a more intelligent way."
