By: Casey Miller
Each year tens of thousands of football fans descend upon one lucky U.S. city to see The Big Game. This year that city was Minneapolis. We wondered, how does this massive influx of people cause congestion in a city and affect travel times?
To explore this question, I explored a few hypothetical routes that people might take around the city that I could then use to query our Directions API and pull real-time navigation route and duration estimates.
Every day, we collect over 225 million miles of aggregated, anonymized telemetry data that feeds back into our Maps and Directions APIs, providing a real-time view of traffic patterns across the world. With the help of my colleague Scott Farley, I set up a lambda function on AWS S3 that gathered route data every 20 minutes in Minneapolis.
Route duration estimates on game day are compared to those at the same times on the Sunday before, January 28. If we were to replicate the study, we’d have aggregated data for multiple Sundays. Take a look at the full analysis, which includes multiple routes and simulated driver profiles.
Use our Navigation SDK and Directions APIs to incorporate directions, real-time traffic, optimized routing, and accurate ETAs into your applications. Have questions? Reach out to our team.
How did the Big Game affect travel times in Minneapolis? was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.