No one knows how to get around a city faster than a cabbie, which is why Microsoft is looking to taxi drivers to improve online mapping tools.

T-Drive, designed by Microsoft Research Asia, reportedly provides far more useful information than Google Maps or Mapquest. The tool can shave drive times as much as 5 minutes, the company says in a research paper (.pdf) outlining the findings.

To develop the tool, Microsoft engineers sifted through three months of data gleaned from the GPS units in 33,000 cabs throughout Beijing. They wanted to identify shortcuts cabbies use to avoid traffic signals, congested intersections and other headaches. "These factors are very subtle and difficult to incorporate into existing routing engines," lead researcher Yu Zheng told Technology Review.

The engineers used T-Drive to merge the GPS data with satellite map information. According to the paper Zheng is presenting this week at a conference in San Jose, California, more than 60 percent of the routes provided by T-Drive were faster than those than those from other online mapping tools. Current tools generally use data on speed limits and the length of a road to determine drive times, and they often cannot identify shortcuts or faster routes like T-Drive can.

"This is the reality of all the Web maps," Zheng said.

At least half the results provided by T-Drive were 20 percent faster than other tools, providing an overall time savings of 16 percent. That amounts to cutting your time behind the wheel by 5 minutes for every 30 minutes of traveling, according to the research paper.

There is of course a catch: The system only applies to Beijing and doesn't include real-time info such as traffic accidents. But the researchers are confident the system will be able to provide real-time data in any city with a lot of cabs.

T-Drive is one of several mapping tools trying to make your commute less hellish. University of California researchers are working with Nokia to develop a system that uses GPS info gleaned from motorists cell phones. And tech startup Waze lets drivers share their real-time routes with social networking sites.

Photo of taxi cabs in Beijing: Aquafortis / Flickr

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