the traffic.com "Jam Factor"

Traffic.com has something they refer to as the "Jam Factor" to tell you how much traffic there is on various major roads in your area. It's an apparently arbitrary number from 0 to 10.

Now, if I see that the jam factor is 3.1 right now, what does that mean? How long is it going to take me to get where I'm going?

They claim:

The Traffic.com Jam Factor is like a "Richter scale" for traffic. It's an overall measure of the traffic conditions on a roadway, or on a section of a roadway. Because the Jam Factor calculation uses real-time speed and travel time measurements from our sensors and those of our partners, as well as our detailed accident, construction and congestion information, it's a comprehensive measure of the state of traffic on any roadway.

The Jam Factor is measured on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the worst traffic conditions. It is designed to give you a quick, at-a-glance picture of conditions on the roadways or personal MyTraffic Drives you care about, whether you're on our web site, looking at an emailed Traffic Report, or listening to a Traffic Report call to your phone. If you see (or hear) a high Jam Factor, you can then delve into the detailed information in the Traffic Report or on the Traffic.com site to find out more.

If you click on the name of any segment of road, it'll tell you how long it takes to get by that piece of road without traffic, and how long it'll take Right Now -- that seems like more meaningful data to me.

If I had to sum up traffic conditions in a single number, it would be the ratio of the two numbers in the previous paragraph. I'd like to know that it'll take me 50% longer to get where I'm going than it would if the roads were clear. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the "jam factor" is just this number disguised somehow.

I prefer what, say, Google Maps does, just overlaying colors (red/yellow/green) on the road; a number, especially one with two significant digits (the Jam Factor is reported to the nearest tenth), implies some sort of precision. I'd rather have no number than a number which has extra decimal places tacked onto it to seem "scientific". (Would I be less annoyed by this if the Jam Factor was reported on a 0-100 scale, to the nearest unit? Who knows?)

Also, if they have sensors of some sort -- why am I limited to knowing how long it'll take to get from a preset point A to a preset point B? Why can't I input the exit I actually get on and off at and have it tell me how long I should expect to spend on the highway? This is a simple matter; they have the speed that the road is moving at at any given moment, so just integrate the reciprocal of speed over the length of road in question. (I realize that it's not quite this trivial, because just because a segment of road is moving at 30 mph right now doesn't mean it'll be moving at that same speed when I get there. My method is sort of like how life expectancies are calculated, which doesn't actually tell YOU how long you're going to live. But forecasting how traffic on any given day will evolve, or how medical care will evolve, is a lot harder than just observing it.)

The Richter scale itself is logarithmic, as many of you probably know -- a difference of one unit on the Richter scale corresponds to a factor of ten in the amplitude of the seismic waves (not a factor of ten in the energy released, as is widely reported; although this isn't my field, it looks like the corresponding increase in energy released is a factor of 10^3/2, or about 32). Other logarithmic scales that you see fairly frequently are decibels (for measuring sound) and Google PageRank (on the 0 to 10 scale); a decibel corresponds to an increase in volume of 10^0.1, and I've read various things but one unit of PageRank seems to correspond to a factor of about five. (No one outside of Google knows for sure.) All of these situations have one thing in common -- most earthquakes, sounds, and web pages are relatively small, and some are much more prominent, so there's a good reason to spread out the small end of the scale and compress the large end. But in the case of the Jam Factor, this isn't necessary; if it takes me an hour on average to drive somewhere, on a really lucky day it might take forty minutes, and on a really unlucky day it might take three hours, but it's never going to take even as much as a hundred hours.

(Incidentally, as you may h ave guessed by now, my preferred mode of transportation is walking. A large part of this is that even though it's slow, I always know exactly how long it's going to take me. There is essentially no situation that slows down or speeds up my walking speed. And even if there were, it never takes me twice as long to walk somewhere as it ordinarily would, whereas driving times that are twice the average are routine. Unfortunately, it's not totally clear whether I save fossil fuel by walking, because I have to eat more food in order to walk.)