Friday, August 19, 2011

Traffic To Your Website | A Week After Debut, Is Maryland's Traffic Hotline Working?

So many of you have been there: sitting in gridlock on the Baltimore Beltway, seething about the traffic and wishing a different route had been taken.

Maryland made avoiding traffic delays easier last week when the State Highway Administration debuted its 511 system , which allows motorists to dial from any phone and get travel information. The automated system also includes reports on weather conditions and public transportation schedules.

The system is averaging about 1,000 calls per day since launching one week ago, Aug. 11, said Glenn McLaughlin, deputy director of the Coordinated Highway Action Response Team (CHART), and the organization hopes the system ultimately handles 250,000 calls per month.

But does it work?

Patch conducted a series of tests on the system over several days and found few quirks and inaccuracies amid mostly positive results.

Last Thursday, the day the system debuted, 511 was dialed from a moving vehicle while heading south on the Northwest Expressway (I-795) on the way to Catonsville from Owings Mills.

From Owings Mills, the system reported both I-795 and the I-695 were clear all the way to Catonsville, though it took several attempts for the system to recognize the pronunciation of Catonsville.

Twice, 511 incorrectly assumed "Laytonsville," a town in Montgomery County, was being spoken. The system asked the town name to be repeated several other times.

In some cases pronunciation of town names has been a challenge, but overall, McLaughlin said voice recognition appears to be working well.

"The vast majority of the feedback that we're getting back right now are growing-pain things," McLaughlin said, like some users having trouble setting up personalized routes using " My Maryland 511 ," the service's companion website that allows callers to create customized traffic information about oft-used travel routes.

"Whenever you set up your account you have to verify it," he said. "People's spam blockers are blocking their verify e-mail."

While the system accurately described traffic conditions heading from Owings Mills to Catonsville, 511 curiously advised that northbound I-795 was experiencing delays due to an obstruction in the roadway.

Traveling southbound, there did not appear to be a delay heading north.

Knowing when to remove a traffic alert from the system is a problem SHA is dealing with now, McLaughlin said.

"There's a couple of interesting technical challenges with that. There will be a certain amount of time before we want to stop telling people about it," he said. "We have some algorithms in place that we're trying to refine, to find that right balance to pull that incident down."

Now, McLaughlin said, it's possible a traffic delay could be reported up to 30 minutes past the time it is no longer an issue.

Also odd was that the system recognized only one possible route from Owings Mills to neighboring Reisterstown, refusing to offer Reisterstown Road as a potential option.

Other tests in Howard County, Montgomery County and Prince George's County showed the system to be correctly reporting traffic conditions and recognizing town names.

The system was tested by the State Highway Administration for 30 days before it went live last week, McLaughlin said, and any new bugs were expected to be fixed as they were reported by 511 users. Users can report problems or make comments on the system by dialing "77" during a call.

As for the future of 511, McLaughlin said his team is looking into adding text and e-mail alerts for routes drivers set up in My Maryland 511 within the next six months.

When reminded that reading text messages while driving was soon to be illegal in Maryland , McLaughlin said there would have to be some responsibility put on the driver to not look down at his or her phone should 511 send out an alert while a driver is already on the road.

"Or maybe we'll just do e-mails," he said.

No comments:

Post a Comment