Tag: routing

Freeway Ramps

No application is really drawing nice ramps yet, but the smarts you can see in Google’s maps show that the data has the potential to support some nice visuals. Having played with doing this sort of thing in an application for work I can tell you that it’s no easy task. The data may be there, but it’s not straightforward. Someday I would imagine that the shapefiles for these highways will be in 3d and it’ll be possible to do a fully dimensioned render and style a 2d view appropriately. Then these things will really look nice. Well before then someone’s going to come out with something that looks really nice in all but the corner cases, though. The programmers working on this stuff are too clever not to.

basically, live maps and yahoo maps are incompetent. funnily, no mention of mapquest, but then their cartography always sucked particularly bad.

Yahoo Maps DnD Directions

using a* much? this is too slow for usage.

The road to better path-finding

Our new route-finding system is hundreds of times faster: it can find and describe a cross-continental shortest path in well under 1 second.

in case you were living under a rock and are still using inferior mapping sites.

1675 Conceptual maps

kids at Stanford work on algorithms for this sort of thing and think they’re hot shit; these are conceptual route maps, focused on transport networks and orienting feature points. The 17th century equivalent of routefinding systems

OSM NL donation

Automotive Navigation Data (AND) is a leading provider of location, routing, mapping and address management are donating a street network of the entire Netherlands. Yes, an entire country. This is basically phenomenal.

major road networks in india and china, too. this is starting to feel like wikipedia in 2002. now if only they did not have such a huge mess on the backend side.

Beating congestion

Researchers from MIT are using data from mobile-phone networks to create real time maps of people moving around the city. Networks keep track of subscribers to ensure signals stay strong, and because so many people have mobiles, this data can give an accurate picture of where people are in a city.

this is not new research, but nice to see it getting some airplay

Routing Waypoints

the first time an online map is easier to use than the desktop applications from 13 years ago.

says one of the original mapquest guys.

MapQuest wakes up

suck it, mapquest. wake me up when you have a routing engine fast enough to do draggable directions.
2008-11-24:

We are not thinking that we will lose all of our users to Google tomorrow.

next week is fine too.

Trucking

Route optimization software can save substantial fuel for trucks and airplanes.

Many look to alternative fuels and hybrid-electric vehicles. But information technology has an important role to play in making existing vehicles more efficient, particularly when it comes to aggregating small gains across large fleets. Take something as simple as reducing left-hand turns. For US drivers, this means less time idling in the middle of the road waiting for oncoming traffic to pass. Collectively, Roadnet clients save an estimated 205m liters of fuel a year and can cut 85k trucks and cars out of their logistics systems.

2013-07-26: What Was a Truck Driver? The US commercial truck fleet has 253m trucks, and employs 5.7m truck drivers. Within 20 years, that should go down to 0 drivers.
2014-05-30: Software truck convoys. This kind of mundane driverless car will be on the road very soon, already saves 10% fuel and can save up to 20% if the distance is further reduced.

2016-11-24: Automating trucking

Across China, 7.2m trucks and 16m drivers are responsible for intercity transportation of goods. This industry is worth $300b, and drivers account for 40% of the costs. Some long-distance trips across China require 3 drivers to complete. The truck freight industry in the US is even bigger, valued at $700b.

2016-12-16: Matching Truckers

Amazon is building an app that matches truck drivers with shippers, a new service that would deepen its presence in the $800B trucking industry. The app is designed to make it easier for truck drivers to find shippers that need goods moved. It would also eliminate the need for a third-party broker, which typically charges a commission of ~15% for doing the middleman work.

2023-01-17: Another take on the trucking industry

In 2022, that figure is 3m truck tractors on the road. From there, we can estimate the average yearly net transactions per truck at $340k per year. Multiply the 2 numbers together, and we get $1.04t!

Trucking is a potpourri of different services and needs. There’s drayage: the process of moving containers from docks to warehouses. There’s reefer (refrigerated truck): the truck trailer is temperature controlled. There’s hazmat: transport of hazardous materials. Flatbed, dry van, tankers, partials, hotshots, box trucks, and more.

2-way mapping

So — when does mapping become a 2-way app? I’d be willing to tell their software that I have a better route, it’s one that comes from living here, and being a cab driver here.