Railway Gate Closure Time - Auto Tracking

[Fahid]

Hi,

Normally people have different routes to travel and may contain railway gates in between. So tracking the time of the railway gate closing, at least on approximate scale, is very important. For Eg: I daily travel to office and I have two options - one via railway gate (its closest if gate is not closed) & other way which will be quickest if railway gate is closed.

I believe the same can be done very easily. First lets have a separate entry for railway gates in google maps. Then the complete stoppage of the vehicles through the gate can be tracked automatically (it will be the closure time of the railway gate) and use this information to display the last day timing of railway gate closure for the user. Also provide information of the last 7 days' statistics for a specified duration which the user chooses. This provide most likely information of the railway gate closure for the day!!

Thanks & Regards,

Fahid K.A.

[JeroenM]

@Fahid

Besides trains bringing traffic to a stand still, the same can be said in many places for bridges. I guess it differs from place to place, but I question how regular these interruptions and how easy to always predict (both as when they occur as the duration of the interruption).

I have been in cities where the center of a city is on an island and real-time information boards inform drivers which route to take, depending on which bridge is open.  In the Netherlands, I have seen a phone app with train trackers. You literally get to see a map with dots moving. So I guess, potentially the information triggers are there in some cases. 

As everything is getting "smarter" these days and with Google's drive to AI to improve our lives, this is certainly a feature that won't stay science fiction for much longer 😉

[Fahid]

@JeroenM thanks for your comments. However I think you have missed the first part i had mentioned - "First lets have a separate entry for railway gates in google maps" - and this differentiate a railway gate and bridge.

[MWJones]

@Fahid in the (now retired) Map Maker product, rail crossings were drawn as an intersection of the road and rail, just like how roads would intersect. In cases where the road passed over or under the rail line, allowing uninterrupted traffic flow, they were typically drawn with an overpass/underpass attribute, and the intersection would not be created, so the logic already exists and is in use for "at grade" crossings. Unfortunately, with the current "suggest an edit" means of reporting edits to roads, there is no simple way to get those changes made, so you have to make your suggestion and hope it is properly interpreted.

In respect to the travel times, that data is provided in near real time from both mobile Maps users and Waze users, and if using your device for navigation, it should provide the most efficient route based on traffic stopping when the grade crossing closes for a train to pass.

[PaulPavlinovich]

Hi @Fahid I think your suggestion to gather the stats is good, but I think Google already do this automatically because Maps is aware of the location of every single device that is navigating (and likely those that are not). When you are navigating with Maps on your Android or iOS device Maps is already aware of the traffic (in many regions) and will route you around hot spots where there are delays. I would imagine that the Maps engine already correlates road delays with railway crossings and would have a good idea what the worst times of day are to be in that area and would avoid those roads where possible.

I use navigation even on my normal home to work commute for this very reason, it routes me around bad traffic.

Regards

Paul

[Fahid]

Hi @MWJones,

Thank you for your reply based on your vast experience.

Problem with the real time data is that it only considers the present traffic situation - indirectly implying present railway gate closure status. It does not know or indicate what may be the status, say after 15 minutes after start of my journey i.e. the time at which I will be reaching the gate.

Regards,

Fahid K.A.

[PaulPavlinovich · Accepted solution]

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@Fahid wrote:

Problem with the real time data is that it only considers the present traffic situation - indirectly implying present railway gate closure status. It does not know or indicate what may be the status, say after 15 minutes after start of my journey i.e. the time at which I will be reaching the gate.

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Hi @Fahid actually it does, sort of. The Maps engine extrapolates based on historical experiences of a given area and watches the traffic which it knows is going into a particular area. It will route people away from bad traffic before it happens. It doesn't always get this right but it is improving as the machine learning model (I'm assuming it is) is trained with our data. Every time you use navigation there is a thumbs up or thumbs down. Use that to express if you think the routing was good or not to help it learn.

What it isn't good at is sudden unpredictable changes but I don't think anything can manage that.

Regards

Paul

[Fahid]

@PaulPavlinovich thanks for the picture perfect reply. This solves the things. Only the gmaps prediction needs to be made better and optimized to get correct data.

Regards,

Fahid K.A.