Univ. to help create traffic app

Sitting in miles worth of traffic can cause drivers to have road rage, anxiety and frustration — but university researchers are helping create a smartphone application and website that will help alleviate some of this tension.

A renewed three-year partnership announced this month with the traffic data collection company Inrix and this university's Center for Advanced Transportation Technology will provide the team with a multi-million-dollar contract to create an app and website that maps out traffic patterns in real time.

By the end of the year, drivers in 10 states along the East Coast will be able to access specific locations of accidents, construction sites and road closures and learn specific details on how fast the traffic is moving in these spots; this differs from other similar apps because it aggregates all this information into one spot, according to CATT Director Tom Jacobs.

"Whenever there is an accident on a road that blocks several lanes, as time progresses you can see the effects of the accident spread farther and farther up the road in the form of slower traffic speeds," senior computer science major and lab researcher John Toman wrote in an email.

Inrix pools data from various companies that collect real-time traffic data and gives this information to the university's CATT lab. Using this data, the lab develops the web-based tools that offer a detailed look at where traffic issues are occurring on a minute-by-minute basis.

The real-time traffic interface will include roadway maps with red, yellow and green color-coded roadways indicating the relative speed. Though some website and apps like this already exist, CATT's software goes steps further to specifically track bottleneck problem areas and relay to drivers how much longer travel is expected to take, Jacobs said.

For more than three years, the lab's partnership with Inrix has provided software tools for traffic engineers and state transportation department officials to analyze how to better serve their highway systems, whether through accident notifications on highway signs or up-to-date travel time information. The contract renewal helps affirm that the lab is making noteworthy progress in this field, Jacobs said.

The first contract with Inrix covered about 5,000 miles of highways across eight states, and the new contract is set to increase highway coverage to 20,000 miles in 10 states, according to an Inrix press release.

"It's a big deal because it's a problem that the federal government and the state governments have been having for years," said Michael Pack, CATT's lab director. "Not having enough data coverage to understand what's really going on — this is finally giving them a big picture view."

Both the old and new contract work with the I-95 Corridor Coalition, the company that oversees the major highway system running from Maine to Florida and has been a major player in seeking ways to improve traffic, Jacobs said. Because of the company's collaboration with the university, more states have been looking to track activity on their local highways, according to Jacobs. The general public's access to CATT's real-time traffic software will translate into better communication for drivers, according to Pack.

"For travelers, it's providing them with good travel time information on the roadways where they can make good decisions about how to get to where they're going," Pack said.

Though the CATT lab employs professional staff members, students develop the majority of work on these web-based tools, Jacobs said.

"The work we do is important because roads can only get so big, eventually it'll come down to making smarter decisions about traffic rather than just making more roads," Toman wrote in an email.

And for CATT lab researchers, the real-time traffic work is likely to continue to grow.

"We've only just started scratching the surface of what we can really do," Jacobs said.

marcot@umdbk.com