Microsoft launches program to help motorists get around faster

Microsoft yesterday announced a little something the company likes to call Clearflow.

Clearflow is the result of a five year long project, which is designed to help people get from A to B as quickly as possible.

By plotting out your car journey and cross-referencing traffic data, Clearflow shows you the best route to take to get to your destination in as little time as possible.

ClearFlow is based around traffic-forecasting client JamBayes. Aside from that Microsoft have over 70 U.S. cities mapped out in fine detail. Your GPS will tell you which side streets and shortcuts might not be so great at any given time in the day.

According to the New York Times, Microsoft’s Eric Horvitz first began working on the project when he was sitting in his car and his car was sitting in traffic. He set his GPS to navigate him through side-streets but it didn’t take him long for him to realise that just because they were side-streets didn’t mean there would be no traffic.

Horvitz decided that for a system like this to work they’d have to map every side street in the city.

“It was awful, everything seemed to be backed up. It hit me that we had to do all the side streets. We really needed to understand the whole city.”

Researchers at Microsoft built software algorithms by keeping GPS units in their own cars. They then were able to build a model for predicting traffic based on four years of data and 16,500 discrete trips covering over 125,000 miles.

Clearflow is available for download from the Windows Live website however there’s been no mention of whether or not a UK version was being developed.

Read more on the New York Times.