I can hardly even imagine what the Burrard Bridge will look like at rush hour when the Olympics are in town. The city is estimated to swell by a million people for the 17-day period. And according to this article, in anticipation of this Olympic-sized traffic jam, Translink has created and will use i-Move.ca, a Web tool and sort of a Google maps on steroids to manage this issue. Launched in November of 2007, and working with Ontario-based Fusepoint, the tool provides information about all possible transit modes around the city in real time. Keenan Kitasaka, manager for intelligent transport systems at Translink says the tool will help everyone make better decisions about getting around the city.
It's not just about the visitors, it's about the residents who'll need to know which roads are closed or open so they can get to work.
The iMove tool shows motorists how to avoid traffic jams indicated by red lines on the highway, transit users can check if their bus is running on time and ferry passengers can find out how close the boat is to harbour.
The site has to be accessible by the public 24/7 and also needs to be updated with data from multiple sources in real-time. Through the Regional Condition Reporting System, 11 municipalities in the Vancouver region currently update iMove and seven are soon to be added. Information fed into iMove includes data pulled from 135 traffic cameras, status information at the border crossing to Seattle, status information on traffic entering two bridges in the city, arrival and departure time at Vancouver International Airport. The Web tool has deep links into the ferry system, links to public and private bus services, Via Rail lines, and to Washington State's updates on Interstate 5 as it approaches the border.
Other cities like Toronto, Montreal and Calgary have all expressed interest in adopting the technology.
It is the world’s most spectacular and unifying event, and in less than three years the eyes of the world will be focused on British Columbia and... [more]
Thanks Translink... it's a great start but this doesn't go far enough since it's an app that will clearly only service Desktop computers with high-speed connections. Where people really want to know this information, on the other hand, is when they're already on the move (ergo, they're untethered and on mobile devices).
That's hard to do, though, and expensive. So why not just FREE THE DATA? Aggregate it as you have already done, and provide updates via a realtime feed so that people writing Personal Navigation apps, or one-man-shops creating iPhone apps, can incorporate the data into their information tools.
As the blurry, 1995-era design of this site might indicate, governments tend not to build particularly user-friendly interfaces and tend to be even less capable of operating high-traffic web services. So better to free the information and nurture an ecosystem of apps to leverage the data.. and let the best geek win.
Well, maybe Translink will take a nod from City of Vancouver and open the data.
I believe I've seen this before, when they weren't using Google Maps and it was a Java based map viewer.
The addition of Google Maps makes it a bit zippier -- but not really any more useful.
I believe the completely unsubstantiated price tag was somewhere around $1M? If so....ouch....
Also, Techvibes, please update the URL. You have the right link, but the text shows iMove.ca instead of i-Move.ca
A new $50,000 challenge was launched to solve traffic. Do you think it will work? http://www.itsa.org/challenge/
