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This article was taken from the March 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
https://www.wired.co.uk/topic/amazonThis is Tel Aviv during rush hour, recorded by social-satnav app Waze. Drivers with the app running on their smartphones are tracked by GPS (routes are shown in green) and their journeys automatically reported to a central database. If the drivers get stuck in a traffic jam, the system alerts other users.
Shown here is a snapshot of Waze activity taken at 3am on May 24, 2011, lifted from a video of 24 hours of traffic data. Purple routes denote traffic jams (distinguished from a user simply slowing down to park by the free flow of other users past the spot), red columns signify hazards reported by users (usually accidents) and blue columns are user warnings of police nearby. Yellow blocks are people chatting -- sending messages or images via the app. The data for the visualisation was crowdsourced from 67,327 users (represented by pink blocks) and includes 4,835 jams, 2,895 hazards and 1,969 police traps. "It all started with a whole bunch of numbers from Waze," says Nikolaus Hanselmann, the Californian programmer who worked with Waze to make the visualisation. "There were trends you'd expect: day and night cycles, congested surface streets and lots of commuters. But what's interesting are the narratives that can be inferred from the system." As jams form, people start chatting -- and when hazards are reported, generally, the cops show up.
See the gallery to explore a large version of the Tel Aviv visualisation.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
