I had been working on this post for a long time now. To be precise it has been more than 4 months now and I feel I have sufficient data with me to share with you all. With the advent of the GPS in mobile devices I first experienced the joy of Sports Tracker with my Nokia N82. It was truly amazing. You could actually see yourself losing those extra kilos right on your device with a whole lot of other features as well.

Ill detail more on that in my coming posts but for now lets stick out attention to a more interesting topic of Traffic Jam. Every now and then we all have been stuck in a traffic jam. Some of them could have been avoided if we had planned our trip in time while others were completely unpredictable. So I went on a traveling spree with Sports Tracker to find a solution for the predictable part. Now you might be thinking how sports tracker would help me on this, well I reckon you read on to know how.

I live approximately 180 km from my hospital. So every Monday I make my way 180 km to east and on Saturdays 180 km west. Well Im not always sticking to the schedule so you may take for that matter I have been doing a lot of haphazard travelling to and fro between home and work. You can better judge from the following diagram. I was all over the Map.

So someday I used to travel during early morning hours and some days in mid noon and a handful of times during the night as well. So I used my sports tracker and uploaded all the results to my profile. With the results compiling up the next was to filter them according to different time frames and check mainly the Speed vs. Time graph tracings.

Above being one of the many tracings, I collected data of over fifty such tracings and made the following points.

• Starting at around 5 am in the morning took 2 hours to complete the journey
• If I somehow happened to start late at around 6 am it took me 3 hours for the same.
• The traffic was at its peak around 10 am and it took 4 hours.
• There was a relief at around 3 pm and it took me 3 hours and 15 minutes.
• The traffic again picked up in the evening at around 6 pm and the time took was maximum, about 4 hours and 30 minutes. (a railway crossing was closed during these hours)
• At night the traffic was less but it still took 3 hours.

So this is how the predictable traffic goes. Im sure now we have a sense when the traffic is on its high and when its on its low.

Apart from the above observation I also noticed the following points: When the car was at its top speed, how much time was spent on traffic signals, where the speed was slow, when did the ride encounter changes in altitude, any pictures taken on way etc?

These details when added upon will tell you which ride took the maximum time. How many kilometers you actually traveled together with your average speed for the ride. Plus you would also know if you were caught in any closed crossing like the one in the evening which always is and costs me 15 to 20 minutes. So, all in all a very useful data analysis which now I keep in mind to make it to work in the shortest time possible. Luckily people in the west have GPS to tell them the traffic situation, but here in India this is the best trick that came to my mind.

A lot of detailed information was provided which can be interpreted to different conclusions. So now I know that even if I go late by 30 minutes to an hour in the morning I will end up in a traffic jam.

Try it on your daily routine and share your results.