Posted on 02/23/2017 5:30:01 PM PST by spintreebob
Just by indicating parking difficulty, cities can encourage people to take public transit rather than drive, perhaps mitigating traffic problems.
According to the Telegraph, an average driver wastes a total of 2,549 hours looking for parking. That’s 106 days of wasted time. Now, those are statistics in the UK, but I bet that drivers in the US living in metro areas waste just as much — if not more — time looking for parking.
Last week, Google quietly launched a new parking feature for Google Maps on Android across 25 major US cities. If you are in these metro areas, you will now see a red parking sign that indicates limited parking availability to help you plan your trip.
The interesting part of this update is that it does not rely on internet-connected parking meters; which often provide incomplete or wrong information due to illegal parkers or those who depart early from their spot. Instead, Google Maps combined crowdsourced data and relatively simple machine learning algorithms to classify parking difficulty.
Google also noted that in a pre-launch experiment, they saw a “significant increase in clicks on the transit travel mode button, indicating that users with additional knowledge of parking difficulty were more likely to consider public transit rather than driving.” Just by indicating parking difficulty, cities can encourage people to take public transit rather than drive, perhaps mitigating traffic problems.
Machine Learning Solution
To train its algorithm, Google set out to classify how “hard” or “easy” it was to find parking by measuring the time it took for its users to park the car. After correlating this information with location data, Google had to then filter out false positives: users parking in a private lot or users arriving via taxi, fooling the system into thinking that parking space was easily available.
(Excerpt) Read more at iot-for-all.com ...
Fake software in the pursuit of the central planning agenda?
Yeah, cause public transit doesn’t waste time at all. Standing at a bus stop, at a train station, out in the weather, waiting for a connecting train, etc.
...or something to hack for when a bomb is put on subway tracks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTcFb-0USP8
From the headline, I thought it was going to be a device to help people figure out how to park their cars! Like this gal in the video.
Free Parking one of many innovations that made America Great.
Simple solution - don’t do business with folks who don’t provide adequate parking.
I just checked it out and it looks like it works only within parts of the city. my area is limited which is true now with all the yuppies moving in. but northeast philly near the airport is medium. and west philly is medium. Home depot is medium. Burbs are blank. won’t mean anything to me anyhow. I use uber for inter city travel and burbs sometimes. never public trans.
That leaves more room for everyone else.
The problem with predictions is that it uses past data. People evolve their strategies, which invalidates the prior knowledge.
The leftist technocrat really believes that if only they can capture and evaluate all the data then they can do a perfect job of central planning.
The leftist technocrat sees the BIG DATA fad of current IT as the solution to their prayers.
Take the recent superbowl. At halftime most people were predicting Atlanta would win. Then early in the 3rd quarter 2 things happened that made Brady and Bellicheck know that they would win the game.
An Atlanta player sauntered into the end zone as if he were playing against amateurs. Then Atlanta special teams recovered an onside kick. The body language of the young players on the sidelines said they thought they had already won the game and did not need to try anymore.
Now all the technocrat needs to do is acquire complete information on the psyche of each player and collect complete information on the group dynamics mass psychology and feed that into the model and then they can accurately predict the outcome of the game.
Eventually Big Data and Analytics will be even smarter than Tom Brady and Bill Bellicheck... that is the belief of the Leftist technocrat.
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