 NATIONAL NEWS TECHNOLOGY | |||
| Personal Traffic Alerts, With Made-to-Order Data By JACQUES STEINBERG Published: July 5, 2007 | |||
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| For many people, getting away for a holiday means sitting in traffic while listening to staccato radio reports about rubbernecking delays and cascading backups. But during the next few days, as Americans extend their Fourth of July celebrations, tens of thousands of motorists around the country will receive up-to-the minute accident alerts and guidance on end runs around bottlenecks — without ever having to turn on a car radio. In the latest incarnation of traffic reporting, information gleaned from strategically placed cameras, road-top sensors, electronic tollbooths and eyewitnesses is edited in Mission Control-style command rooms and sent using personalized text or voice messages to subscribers' cellphones or BlackBerrys, often at no charge. These advances are part of an effort by private traffic services to bring some science and precision to what, at least until the last few years, was an art form typically practiced by a reporter in a helicopter or an announcer glued to a terminal in a windowless cubicle. While radio stations continue to send traffic copters into the air — including at least three serving New York City alone — their "eye in the sky" observations are now only one of the streams of data at travelers' disposal. The new traffic reports continue to be largely produced by AM and FM stations or their partners, even though the reports may give motorists one less reason to tune in the very station supplying the new alerts, like WINS in New York or WTOP in Washington. "Radio was always about coming out of the dashboard of the car or the clock radio when your alarm goes off," said Mark Mason, executive editor of WINS, an all-news station that, like print and television news outlets, is facing more competition than ever, including from iPods and satellite radio. "While we have to continue to be in our users' ears, we also need to be in the palms of their hands — where they are, whenever they are." David Cary, a commercial real-estate appraiser who drives 500 miles a week in and around Boston, said he was increasingly tuning out a local station's "Traffic on the 3s" report in favor of SmarTraveler, a personalized service offered by a unit of Westwood One, a radio syndicator and a major traffic-watching provider. To find out whether the coast is clear, he can hit *1 on his cellphone and pick from a menu of recorded updates on major roadways. "It told me it was O.K. to head for the Cape," Mr. Cary said by phone from his blue Volvo station wagon on Friday afternoon, as he stopped work for the weekend. "That the bridges weren't backed up. That's what I was checking on." Bill Lowry, senior director of security for Dolphin Stadium in Miami, where the Miami Dolphins play, said he was so impressed with a similar service that he used to navigate from his home in Fort Lauderdale that he was working with Westwood One to develop a game-day service for fans. Believed to be the first of its kind in the N.F.L., the service will send alerts to people as they approach the stadium telling them of accidents, slowdowns and parking availability. Westwood One, which said more than 100,000 people across the country had signed up for personalized alerts in the last year or so, hardly has the field to itself. Traffic.com provides customized bulletins to motorists in more than four dozen cities and estimates its subscriber list at 500,000. It is owned by Navteq, an industry leader in drafting digital maps, including those used in auto-navigation systems that often provide traffic information. Meanwhile, Clear Channel, the radio behemoth, has spurned outside traffic providers like Westwood One in recent years and has developed its own reporting service, which is reached through realtimetraffic.net. The iPhone also provides maps with road conditions. While that might be good news for drivers, it has put the mainstays of the traffic-reporting business somewhat on the defensive, including Joe Nolan, long heard on WPLJ radio and WABC television in New York, and Pete Tauriello of WINS. Mr. Tauriello and Mr. Nolan are employees of Westwood One, which provides most traffic information to broadcasters in the nation's largest metropolitan areas. From his studio in Rutherford, N.J., where three dozen Westwood One cameras were trained on various local roads, Mr. Tauriello defended the old-fashioned radio reports. "Let's say, just for discussion's sake, a car goes off the Brooklyn Bridge here and into the water," he said, pointing to a live image on a monitor. "I'm on the air. I can see that instantaneously. And I'm saying it as I see it." "To get that on the network" of pagers and cellphones, he added, "that has to be inputted into a terminal. It takes time to write that up, and for the equipment to process it and get it to you." After a motorist has that information in hand, there is the challenge of reading it off of a miniature screen while driving. "I think," Mr. Tauriello said with an audible swagger, "I'm a little bit faster on the trigger." | |||
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| Still, a visitor who had signed up for the WINS electronic service on the Web the previous afternoon — it requires little more than entering a starting point and destination, as well as estimated departure time — found that the customized alerts also had their advantages. For one thing, the text messages that periodically arrived with a buzz during a trip from Westchester County to New Jersey referred only to traffic flow along his route and weeded out much of what Mr. Tauriello was describing that morning over the radio in 10-minute intervals, like collisions near Route 684 in Armonk, N.Y., or on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. Those incidents were nowhere nearby, and effectively irrelevant. In pitching its reports, whether on radio or pager, to broadcasters and motorists alike, Westwood One emphasizes its process for checking and rechecking its findings. Its version of Mission Control is in Houston, in a gleaming skyscraper down the road from NASA's. From a room crammed with flat-panel television and computer screens, four fact checkers continually scan databases for outdated information and browbeat affiliates around the country to update drivers. On a recent morning a checker, Rosemary Kurr, who had previously worked as a dog groomer, called a Westwood One office 1,100 miles away in Grand Rapids, Mich. Ms. Kurr wanted to ask why it had not updated drivers on an accident that, as described to motorists in a bulletin, was to have been cleared by 7:39 a.m. It was now nearly 8 a.m., and no new information had been posted. "No answer," Ms. Kurr said to a supervisor with obvious irritation before sending an e-mail query. For all the advances in describing traffic, even those charged with reporting its conditions can still be caught in the occasional jam. Just after 8 a.m. that day a colleague of Ms. Kurr in the Westwood One quality-control unit, Jim Morris, a former engineer on a nuclear submarine, arrived breathless and late. "I'm sorry," he told his supervisor, Jay Trotsky. "There was an 11-car pileup on 45." "Yeah," Mr. Trotsky said. "I know." | |||
sábado, julio 07, 2007
Alertas del estado del tráfico, por celular, emitidas por servidores ASP.
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