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TCNJ Magazine Fall 2019

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29 FALL 2019 29 not immediate, we hope we're able to have a long-term impact on how people travel in New Jersey." Don't traffic apps like Waze already do this? Not exactly. While Waze uses algorithms to predict traffic conditions on specific routes, Brennan's research uses some of the same underlying data, much of it harvested anonymously from automobile GPS devices and cell towers, to offer "more of a 30,000-foot look." His aim is to quantify regional "congestion resiliency," or the ability of an area to return to normal traffic after a disruption, he says. The summer project called for the students to manage a mind-boggling amount of raw data. Even after winnowing it down to a fraction of its original size and entering it into Excel spreadsheets, each day still added up to 700,000 lines of code, and getting to that point required the processing power of 70 campus computers, Brennan says. How do you get your hands on 70 computers? "We just go in," he says with a laugh. "And hopefully, nobody comes in. We've been kicked out of labs. It has happened." L to R: Bob Dinger, Tom Brennan, and Tom Dinger The oft-derided "Jersey left" debuted in Montville on U.S. 46 and near Monmouth Park Racetrack in the late 1930s.

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