{"id":342,"date":"2015-08-11T22:10:06","date_gmt":"2015-08-11T21:10:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alexander.vondrous.de\/?p=342"},"modified":"2015-08-26T06:29:12","modified_gmt":"2015-08-26T05:29:12","slug":"ready-steady-gooooo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alexander.vondrous.de\/?p=342","title":{"rendered":"Ready, Steady, GOOOOO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Traffic jams and rush hours\u00a0reduce my free\u00a0time, which I can\u00a0spend with more meaningful activities. Usually I use the commute to come down from work and to switch into private mode. Unfortunately I do not need an hour to arrive in the private world, such that I waste a lot of time in the car. Even the best podcasts are sometimes of no use to bridge the time. In order to reduce the commute time from my office to my home, I tried experimentally to figure out which departure time is the best. Beside the desired sampling rate and a long observation period,\u00a0I am lazy and I forget to make notes. After a week the\u00a0experiments felt fuzzy and the way of solving the problem did not satisfy the little nerdiness I carry with me but I got the best case and worst case timings:<\/p>\n

Travel distance:                50 km\r\nBest case (moderate speed):     35 minutes\r\nBest case (pedal to the metal): 30 minutes\r\nWorst case:                     60 minutes<\/pre>\n
What do\u00a0humans in the 21st century use\u00a0to estimate the travel time? Google maps! OK thats the way to go. The nice thing is, that\u00a0google maps is able to take the current traffic situation into account. I can let the computer do the nasty work of taking notes.<\/p>\n
\"Bildschirmfoto<\/a><\/p>\n
Within 80 lines of Java code (with empty lines ;-), the google maps API is\u00a0queried every minute and the result is stored in a file. After about $3.5$ weeks of data acquisition a bash script extracts and\u00a0groups\u00a0the estimated travel time for each day of\u00a0the week into a single file. One data point consists of the time and estimated travel time pair: “HH-MM-SS : estimated travel time”. Up\u00a0to 4 data points of each minute made the visualization messy.\u00a0To reduce the number of data points a python script computes the mean value for each minute. Finally D3 javascript is\u00a0used to visualize the data as you can see if you click on one of the following weekdays.<\/p>\n
Monday<\/a>, Tuesday<\/a>, Wednesday<\/a>, Thursday<\/a>, Friday<\/a>, Saturday<\/a>, Sunday<\/a><\/p>\n
Between 1 am \u00a0and 5 am google does not deliver travel time estimations or the more probable explanation\u00a0is, that google knows about a\u00a0stargate nearby, which opens from 1 am to 5 am. Beside the things google knows, the interesting parts for me are the rush hour peaks around 5 pm. On Monday there is\u00a0surprisingly no peak. Maybe the measurement period of about $3.5$ weeks was to short.\u00a0On Tuesday and Wednesday the peaks are after 5 pm and on Thursday and Friday the peaks are shifted towards 4pm. Surprisingly a 12 o’clock peak occurs on saturday. A colleague called\u00a0it “the Saturday shopping rush”, which\u00a0matches\u00a0pretty well with\u00a0my observations of\u00a0shopping on a saturday. Sunday is no surprise at all.<\/p>\n
As a result for me: Find the Stargate!\u00a0Go early to work and leave early.\u00a0If you want to stay in the bed for a few moments, consider a few moments more.<\/p>\n
Supplement: The\u00a0experimental observation indicates, that during\u00a0school vacations\u00a0the rush hour is significantly shorter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Traffic jams and rush hours\u00a0reduce my free\u00a0time, which I can\u00a0spend with more meaningful activities. Usually I use the commute to come down from work and to switch into private mode. Unfortunately I do not need an hour to arrive in the private world, such that I waste a lot of time in the car. Even … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[37,36,34,38,35],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexander.vondrous.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexander.vondrous.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexander.vondrous.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexander.vondrous.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexander.vondrous.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=342"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/alexander.vondrous.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":367,"href":"https:\/\/alexander.vondrous.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions\/367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexander.vondrous.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexander.vondrous.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexander.vondrous.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}