Addison Lee is London’s largest minicab operator.  The Financial Times reports that the firm is using GPS to track the movements of its cars over a three year period.  This archive allows predictions of how long a given journey should take at different times of the day, permitting the firm to allocate jobs to its drivers with the aim of getting to the customer faster.  It plans to provide drivers with better routes, based on past overall experience of the fleet.  The journey time prediction software helps the company’s drivers compete with black cabs whose drivers have ‘the Knowledge’, the mental map of routes that takes about three years to learn.

The man problem with congestion is uncertainty of journey time.  So being able to predict journey times reasonably well is a good way of tackling the consequences of congestion – easier than widening roads or introducing congestion charging.  I’ve argued this in my paper ‘Predictive Navigation’.  It’s good to see the idea being put into practice in London, driven by commercial imperatives.