GPS Tracking ROI

Am I the only one a bit mystified and appalled by this?

TAKOTNA, Alaska (AP) — A 61-year-old rookie Iditarod musher turned up on the wrong trail Thursday, hours after race officials started to search for the woman thought lost along a treacherous stretch.

Deborah Bicknell of Juneau was spotted from the air driving her team through Ptarmigan Pass, a route formerly used in the race, said race spokesman Chas St. George.

“It appears she took the wrong trail,” St. George said.

She was seen driving her dog team 18 miles from the Rohn checkpoint, where she arrived late Thursday. Other information about her was not immediately available…. read the full CNN story here:

OK, here we have what has become probably the most historic and closely followed dog race in the world. We have a small fortune in special sleds, racing equipment, hundreds of expensive and beloved canine athletes and a bunch of brave, if half-crazy mushers, racing across some of the most demanding and physically dangerous country in the world.

And this lady takes a wrong turn … as others have done before her and and others will no doubt do in the future. And in the year 2007 with GPS even tracking Big Pussy Bompensaro’s golf cart and high school kids playing GPS hide and seek with their cell phones … and we send these teams out into the wilderness without a real time GPS? (more…)

You’ve seen me talk about the usefulness and the distinct return on investment (ROI) of tracking your city’s public transportation with GPS many times in the past. One of the principal reasons you get an ROI is the fact that it makes your system more accessible and useful to the rider … ergo … better returns in the farebox.

Aside from the cost of equipping your vehicles the really big cost of systems like this is making the data available to the public. Specialized transportation route maps are expensive to produce and, if you’ve ever looked at many of them there’s a depressing lack of standardization and user friendliness between different systems. What to do? here’s this Mr. GPS guy advocating that we spend our hard-earned tax dollar again, right?

Wrong. Mr. GPS says … Google it! See the nice little map snippet? Looks familiar, even at this scale. The gray line down the right-hand side is a test trip planning route I plugged into the system and got back a (literally) step by step route that told me when I could leave, how far I had to walk, what public transport to take for the main part of the trip, and how much it would cost me.

If you don’t recognize the mapped area, it is down town Portland, Oregon. And how much does this service cost Portland you might ask? Zero. Zip. Nada. No cost. It’s one of many cities already accommodated in Google’s Transit Trip Planner, part of the ever-growing Google labs.

I’ve already shown you numerous times how cities can put their live GPS tracking data on Google Maps, making it available to the public. Now, even if you don’t have live data, Google can make your transit system sing, for residents and visitors alike.

To test the usefulness to visitors I changed the parameters of my search and typed in PDX as my distant end. PDX is the three-letter airport designator for the Portland airport .. don’t worry you don’t have to remember it, it will be plastered all over your luggage and ticket if you fly to Portland. Why would I care about the airport designator for a tool like this? That’s easy. Quick, give me street address of your closest airport. Give me the street address for the Los Angeles International Airport? bet you don’t have it memorized (it’s LAX Airport, 7301 World Way West, Los Angeles, CA 90045 by the way) but travelers all over the world understand LAX, and so does Google. Clever.

Here’s how you would get from the original test address to Portland’s airport, the times you can leave, the costs and every thing you need to travel smartly and arrive on time, as cheaply as possible and in an environmentally sound manner. (more…)

Several times in the recent past I’ve mentioned the use of anonymous GPS Tracking data from highway vehicles to use as inputs to Intelligent Transportation Services (ITS) and other technology systems to aid the calculation and display of traffic flows. There are a number of methods used to measure traffic flow parameters and GPS Tracking is just coming into its own in this field.

Most systems rely on the classic inductive pavement loop sensors that operate like the illustration here. You’ve seen these thousands and thousands of times, perhaps without realizing it because they are used all over the world to control intelligent traffic light systems. As you roll up to your next red light, look down at the pavement as you come up to the “stop line” painted on the road surface. You can often see that the road has been slit and then filled in with some kind of sealant in a rectangular pattern. That’s the most common installation method for these sensors. Commonly they have only been used to tell the computer that controls the timing of the traffic signal about vehicles waiting in the lane for a green light. But they can also be aggregated into a traffic information system and give a world of information to traffic managers, planners and real-time controllers.

Like almost everything involving technology they have their pluses and minuses: (more…)

This caught my eye this morning:

Is there anything this shameless promoter (me) won’t bring up to interest you in GPS? Well I don’t really know … I haven’t gotten around to sex yet. but who knows?

Yesterday I talked about GPS controlling the weather … hope you had a nice respite from the winter blues. A friend of mine, Brendon Sinclair is riding his “push bike” (I wonder when the Australians are going to figure out what those pedal gizmos are for … reminds me of a funny chain saw joke, but I digress) in a charity event later this month (see here if you’re interested in good causes), and we’ve discussed the idea of tracking riders in the event via GPS and using a tool like Google maps to follow the event’s progress. Not sure if the GPS Tracking is going to come to pass, but the organizers have grabbed on to the map idea pretty effectively.

I was casually looking around for other sites with this idea when I came upon this beauty. (more…)

Well how about it all my brethren still stuck back there in the USA, Canada or Europe, are you heartily sick of winter, yet. Did you ever look up in the top left of the screen on this blog and see the little time and temperature widget? That’s up to the minute (0858 local time on 5 March) here in delightful Bulacan, Republic of the Philippines. My dear wife, the Unofficial Cook likes to depress me each morning by looking back at the traffic cams in Colorado Springs … I can’t believe how many years I lived in that mess … but I don’t now.

Maybe you can’t retire yet, but you can get a break. When I was a boy I watched the great passenger liners disappear, one by one. But what a renaissance there has been in cruise ships instead! Wow the numbers and choices are just astounding. If you were a cruse ship operator or travel agent what would you use to entice customers to choose your line of product over all your competitors? (more…)

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Notice anything a little different in the Google maps snippet to the left of these words?

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