More bus-related whingeing
It occurred to me that using the bus prediction system to estimate traffic congestion would make a nice student research project. Bus flow along Dominion Rd or through Newmarket, say, gives a lot of information about traffic congestions. This information might be useful for improving bus predictions, but also might be useful for drivers as a way of getting real-time congestion data for a much larger set of roads than is currently available.
Unfortunately, the terms of use for the prediction system say “No part of the MAXX Website may be distributed, resold, published, copied, reproduced, transmitted or stored and you are not permitted to incorporate the material or any part of it in any other work or publication (whether in hard copy, electronic or any other form) without ATs express written consent.” I’m not sure if this is actually true, but it’s a fight I don’t need to have.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
As more bus lanes are installed, the hope is that information about bus flow won’t provide much information about the flow of non-bus traffic as the two systems become somewhat decoupled (aside from obvious things like time of day effects).
But those are pretty onerous usage conditions for what is essentially public data.
12 years ago
Decoupling might work along Dominion Rd, but it’s going to be hard in Newmarket.
Even with bus lanes, if they are just adjacent to the general-use lanes there’s still some slowing effect of heavy traffic. It might not be enough to show above the noise, though.
12 years ago