About sebflipper

Last week I decided to use my mobile phone and bluetooth GPS receiver to log a weeks worth of commuting to see which route is the best and what days are the worst. I used a freeware tool called NoniGPSPlot on my mobile and TrailRunner on my Mac, which is geared more towards running, and biking etc but also works well plotting driving routes. It basically shows a line graph of speed allowing you to click on a curtain point and see where you were at the time, it also has nice integration with Google Maps, Live Maps and OpenStreetMap.

Bizarrely with the amount of accuracy with GPS these days you can actually see what lane you were in at the time and even if you were changing lanes. My findings are it takes longer in the mornings to get to work, in the worse case it took 1 hour 9 minutes to get in, where as it only took 41 minutes to get home, almost 30 minute difference! I think the main problem is the school run in the mornings seem to clog the roads quite a bit. Going different ways didn’t seem to save much time unless the motorway was totally jammed.

I can see people like TomTom building this sort thing into their next generation of GPS devices so that they can accurately model and predict what roads and at what time they will be jammed, as well as sending back live data to a central database to which can inform other GPS users to avoid certain roads.

You can also monitor my dodgy parking with the previous route overlays!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 8:39 pm and is filed under General News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.