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Boston has a on-demand real-time traffic report service called SmarTraveler. Six other cities have it as well, and doubtless there are similar services by other names. In Massachusetts it's subsidized by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, and, as they say "Dial Star-One on your cellular phone, it's a free call."

Obviously the authorities think it's a good idea and want you to access it on your cellular phone. You can also access it via the web and of course via landline phones, so if the authorities don't want you to use it while driving, why did they make it a free star-one cellular call?

What is needed is the ability to select roads *not* to use. This would make bicycle routing much more effective. It would also be useful for driving directions. You may know that a particular road is undesireable do to construction, predictable congestion, etc. It would be really handy to able to say "I know 101 is jammed, what's the next best way"

That is a fantastic idea. It would be really useful to have an online trip plotting service that could tap into realtime traffic congestion data. So for example, Mapquest or Yahooo could partner with a company like Smartraveler, so that they could do things like "the shortest route from Boston to Woburn is to take I-93 North for 10 miles, but there is an accident near the Stoneham exit that is backing up traffic for six miles, so here's how you can take Rt. 28 instead".

Better still, you could include scheduled trip time to the search, so that if you plan to take your trip between (say) 7-9am or 4-7pm, the software can assume that highways will have rush hour traffic and you may want to try alternate routes for part or all of the trip. That should be pretty easy to plug into the system, and could possibly be done with no external data provider.

More clever, but possibly harder to implement and almost definitely reliant on external information, would be special event planning: "this route for a trip next Sunday afternoon from Museum of Science, Boston to Alewife T station, Cambridge avoids Memorial Drive in Cambridge, because the 'Head of the Charles' regatta will be delaying traffic on Memorial & Storrow Drives this weekend." (Well, last weekend, but pretend that the system is being predictive here.) Or "this route from South Station, Boston to Museum of Science, Boston is taking you down Mass Ave, across the Charles River, and then up Memorial Drive, because there's a Bruins game at the Fleet Center and traffic in that part of town will be at a standstill tonight, so it makes sense to drive twice as far to get where you're going because you won't want to be stuck in that traffic.

If any of these trip planning services could call on this kind of up to the minute -- or beyond -- information when making their route suggestions, the value of the service would go way up.

Yes, a dearth of pleasant obstacles and highways laid out by surveyors instead of geological and historical accident does make seeking alternate routes easier. It also means you can get more people living within the 30-mile circle if all of it's above water!

In Boston, whether you have alternate routes available or not depends on where you're coming from and going to ... and whether you know the "surface roads" well enough to zig-zag around blockages. A few decades back, a map of the roadnet connecting Rt.128 exits was sold as a detour map ... the folks living in those quiet commuter neighborhoods were horrified, and those of us who'd been exploiting the detours available only to locals and the map-literate were not entirely happy at sharing either.

- Bill

It seems like, aside from the continual updates thing, a nicer idea would be to have a PalmOS or WinCE version that would be updated either at sync time or, hardware allowing, continually via wi-fi, modem, or Bluetooth circuitry. Better still, if your PDA had GPS abilities, then getting current traffic info (and, why not, weather as well) for your current location would be even better. By going to a traditional PDA, you lose the real-time updates that the dedicated device seems to provide, but you also lose one more gadget to have to carry around (or, I suppose, just leave in your glovebox), and you also gain a good deal of flexibility.

I think the most interesting thing about this application is the excellent data representation of in the WA-DOT map. I'd like to see this traffic map style replace some of the other, clumsier traffic sites that I'm used to, with their breakdown of a region in arbitrary ways ("well, my route takes me from this section, across part of that one, and ends up at this third one..."), under-descriptive icons, pages of text ("wait, where the hell is Frontage Road? OH, the so-and-so landmark on interstate $foo..."), useless webcams that are greyed by smog and blocked by obstacles, and maps that don't attempt to tell you anything at all. Compare this to the WA-DOT's system, which tell you conditions between each exit, attempts to explain data holes ("no data" / "no equipment"), and even provides archives of maps at earlier times ("what the hell was going on last Thursday?"). Nice!

But I don't think I want a device dedicated to receiving that information.

Especially one targeted only at Seattle... :-)

It seems like, aside from the continual updates thing, a nicer idea would be to have a PalmOS or WinCE version that would be updated either at sync time or, hardware allowing, continually via wi-fi, modem, or Bluetooth circuitry. Better still, if your PDA had GPS abilities, then getting current traffic info (and, why not, weather as well) for your current location would be even better. By going to a traditional PDA, you lose the real-time updates that the dedicated device seems to provide, but you also lose one more gadget to have to carry around (or, I suppose, just leave in your glovebox), and you also gain a good deal of flexibility.

I think the most interesting thing about this application is the excellent data representation of in the WA-DOT map. I'd like to see this traffic map style replace some of the other, clumsier traffic sites that I'm used to, with their breakdown of a region in arbitrary ways ("well, my route takes me from this section, across part of that one, and ends up at this third one..."), under-descriptive icons, pages of text ("wait, where the hell is Frontage Road? OH, the so-and-so landmark on interstate $foo..."), useless webcams that are greyed by smog and blocked by obstacles, and maps that don't attempt to tell you anything at all. Compare this to the WA-DOT's system, which tell you conditions between each exit, attempts to explain data holes ("no data" / "no equipment"), and even provides archives of maps at earlier times ("what the hell was going on last Thursday?"). Nice!

But I don't think I want a device dedicated to receiving that information.

Especially one targeted only at Seattle... :-)

...and the data is available from many sites.

The nice thing here is that engineers can use data obtained from GPS to analyze traffic hot spots and design appropriate solutions to them without having to go to the site, set up cameras, observe traffic, etc. when determining the cause of the hot spot.

In addition, using GPS makes it easy to add traffic monitoring to other locations quickly, again without installing cameras, traffic counters, etc.

For example, in the '96 Olympics, Atlanta added several hundred cameras around the city's highways and streets to monitor traffic around the games. Shortly, cities that will be hosting the Olympics and other major events can get the GPS data feeds without the need to setup all that equipment.