Background

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Background

Currently Brisbane has no public mapped visualisation of traffic congestion. The only traffic services available to commuters are:

a phone service, 13 19 40, and
its partner website, 131940.qld.gov.au, which has text based traffic incidents and road works.

To date there is no mechanism to make these data available in a ‘grid environment’ for wider access. It is critical to facilitate and automate many basic data management processes. ‘Data grids’ can provide these functions by providing infrastructure and tools needed to facilitate discovery and analysis, and long-term preservation of data.

Road Traffic Visualisation Systems

In Melbourne, there is a mapped service by VicRoads, which is at traffic.vicroads.vic.gov.au. This shows coloured roads and if required, information on tow trucks, accidents, events and roadworks. This is not based on Google Maps but a similar service in which panning and zooming is allowed. It does not provide traffic forecasting of any kind.

In Germany, there is a traffic system avaliable which also shows a map and coloured roads. It is flash based and only whows monitored roads, not other roads. It also provides info on roadworks, accidents, events, etc. However it provides forcasting for 30min/60min into the future, as well as a specific day/time in the next week. (this si based off historic data). Can be found at www.autobahn.nrw.de

In America, England and France, Google provides traffic information on their Google Maps service. As with the others, it contains info on events, accidents, roadworks, etc. It also allows you to querie the predicted traffic at a specific day/time based on historic data.

This initiative builds on existing developments made overseas and through strategic collaborations between UQ-VisLab, QCIF and CalIT2 at UC San Diego.