Historical traffic on Maps

Well, here I am. My first day (un)officially working for Google. I had the opportunity this morning to make myself more familiar with the product lineup, and I'm excited by what I see!

So after I got my desk sorted out (I chose to bring in my own faux wooden cubicle floor, some plastic palms and cheap astroturf to wrap some of my desk in...along with my cheapie rock garden and water fountain...) I took a look at the feeds and checked out Google Maps' new service.

As you may have heard, Google Maps now offers traffic conditions for most major cities. I was lucky enough to catch a special on TV one day a while back that showed how this system has been used since something like the 1970's. (?)

Here in Chicago, there are magnetic sensors in the interstates surrounding the Chicagoland area. The sensors report in to a central machine, and update a display every 2 seconds or so to show traffic flow. By knowing how many vehicles travel through a given set of checkpoints over a given amount of time, they can estimate average speed, and assume that slow traffic (like 30 mph) means traffic congestion.

Originally meant for emergency crews, this information has been used to give real-time traffic reports to the public. The best site I’ve seen that uses this type of information is the one over at gcmtravel.com. I like it, because not only are you able to look up traffic conditions, but you can look up historical traffic statistics.

This doesn't sound like much, until you realize that if you look at the data, you can save (and I do) over 15-20 minutes in the car by shifting your departure time as little as 5 minutes. This is easily accomplished by looking up the traffic statistics for a particular time of day, on a particular stretch of road, on a given day of the year. By timing your travel so you’re not in the congested sections of highway when they traditionally have problems, you can save a large amount of time by slightly adjusting your departure time. In addition, if you know you're going to be stuck in a 5-minute merging zone, it's a big stress relief to know ahead of time and be able to adjust accordingly.

Traffic stats on Google are a great thing, and I'd like to ring the guys over at Maps and congratulate them, but also to make a suggestion: although the information is very cool, maybe we can use it in a few more ways?

• Let's have a little pop-out window to help people plan their commute. The starting point, destinations and (to a large degree) departure times are about the same year-round. Why not record traffic statistics and help people plan their commute? I propose giving the application your information, and a window in which you'd like to depart, and it will give you suggested departure times within that window to meet the least resistance. It doesn't sound like much, but I've been doing it for years with the gcmtravel.com website, and I can verify that moving your departure time as little as 5 minutes earlier (or sometimes later!) can make a difference in travel time anywhere between 10-20 minutes!
• Along these same lines, why not build this technology into the multiple-destination feature in Maps? Seems like if people are going to be using the expressways, maybe they can stop at their destinations in the order to which there is least traffic (not to mention the most efficient path to meet all destinations).

I've got a lot more Maps-related ideas, but I'll limit this post to the traffic-specific ones. Looking forward to my second day!