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Beating Traffic By Joining the Network
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Generally, roads that were free-flowing were marked green, and congested areas were marked red or orange. But one congested off-ramp that should have been marked in red on the screen instead showed green. No Dash user had recently been over that stretch, and so it showed the average traffic level there for that time of day.
Timothy Dilks, 29, a systems engineer who lives in Alexandria and works in Reston, was among the 20 people selected to test the units around Washington. Dilks, who got involved with the test by answering an ad on a technology Web site, described himself as obsessive "when it comes to navigation and knowing where I am" and said he has owned five GPS devices over the past decade.
He called the Dash "pretty amazing," a marked advancement because it offers both better traffic predictions and access to information from the Web.
"It definitely helps to know how long it's going to take to get there," he said. "Unfortunately, there's really no alternate routes on my commute, so if I'm stuck on I-495, I'm stuck."
The company hopes that by using INRIX's traffic data as a baseline, and by offering Internet access, it will draw customers before the Dash driver network becomes widespread.
Whether the Dash venture works out, experts in the field say that eventually one of the companies experimenting with the technology will get it right.
John Frawley, executive vice president of broadcast operations at Westwood One, which provides traffic information to more than 2,400 radio stations around the country, including WTOP, called it the industry's hottest topic.
Once it works, "this kind of GPS tracking is going to make some of the older technology obsolete almost instantaneously," he said.
