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Yahoo! Maps to Support Realtime Traffic
squidfrog writes "Yahoo is set to support realtime traffic overlays for its existing Yahoo! Maps program. 'Yahoo's dynamic maps draw on real-time traffic information from metropolitan transportation departments and private providers, including embedded road sensors, traffic cameras, police scanners, and traffic helicopters. Yahoo declined to identify the exact sources of its traffic data... Roadways are colored green, yellow and red, to highlight the normal movement of traffic, minor delays or severe road congestion. A user can hover over a stretch of road to view details of impediments.'"
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/seattle/
and you can even get it on mobile devices:
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/seattle/products/
Man, not the largest ciy in NH...... I can't believe they missed that one ;-)
I hope they tie into emergency services too and show lazily rendered orange flames coming from the windows of any burning buildings.
Come to think about it, how about a Average Income Overlay while we're at it so I know where to look for cheap girls. Er, for cheap monitors.
vicious, untreated political sewage...niche entertainment for the spiritually unattractive...worshipless pap
Instead of just showing road traffic and only offering driving directions, Yahoo could make using public transportation easier by offering directions using buses, subways, and commuter rails as an option. It would allow people to use public transportation without having to spend a lot of time figuring out all the different bus routes and schedules. Maybe it would reduce the traffic a bit.
The Taco Bell down the road from me is utterly useless to the 99% of the world's population who doesn't live in my city. They might as well close down since there are so many people who can't use it. How dare they provide a service for some people without taking the entire planet's population into consideration? Those arrogant pricks!
Traffic.com also posts realtime traffic flow information, and they say they get their data from these sources.
-- Fratz, human
I want my navigation system to adjust to unforeseen (realtime) traffic data and re-route me when appropriate, but the most important thing is for it to calculate an effective top speed for each potential road along the path, based on their historical flow data on various days of the week, holidays, and at various times of day. That way, it may realize that a 35MPH side-road that parallels the highway is actually faster than the 65MPH highway at 4:00PM on days when there's some sporting event going on. Prevents me from having to know this stuff :)
Yes, I still want to actually drive the car, thank you very much :)
-- Fratz, human
I have a hard time believing how slowly online maps are progressing.
I don't care about traffic info, I can get that myself, elsewhere, but online maps don't even ALLOW you to request an alternate route. You have time and distance to choose from, and that's all.
While I'm complaining, let's talk about the weather channel's web-site. They show you the weather over the major freeways in the country, but it is horrendous at predicting anything. It simply takes today's weather, and assumes everything will be less severe every day after... It's perfectly consistent in this behavior, even when their own forecast know, a week in advance, that the weather is actually going to get worse.
And radio stations are no better. All the "highway stations" tell you a little bit about traffic if you tune-in at the right time, but never anything about bad weather. I was driving directly into the path of a 300mile blizzard, and I didn't have a clue. Even after there was a massive accident that completely blocked the freeway, none of the new media reported (or knew) about it until the next day.
It seems like everything we have in-place is completely impotent. It's even that forecasts are bad, it's that all the information that is well-known is kept isolated, and only provided to the people that need to know about it the MOST, after everything is over.
These are all VERY, VERY simple and easy things, yet nobody has bothered to do it. I think this is clearly an indication of what happens when media outlets are consolidated, reduced to doing nothing but imitating the competition, etc.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
TMC
Traffic Message Channel is a pretty successful system in some European countries that transmits current traffic conditions via the RDS (radio data system) components of standard FM radio station broadcasting. Provided with a special GPS receiver (which basically includes a FM radio) users in Europe can let Navigon adjust it's routing decisions based on the incoming TMC messages. In the US the picture is very different. Every metropole has its own traffic messaging system, they are all incompatible, and most of them are not free services anyhow. As a result the OnCourse Navigator program has left out the TMC functionality. If you come over from Europe and use your MN|4 with the maps of OnCourse Navigator then keep in mind that TMC is of no use here.
Mapquest is worse than Yahoo, but they both are years out of date for the roads in my neighborhood and both are useless in giving directions to our house. A railroad that was taken out some ten years ago and converted to a bike path is still on Mapquest. Both maps show a road that has been closed and don't have a new road that replaces it hundreds of yards away.
Last year I was scanning Popular Science and saw an ad for a Garmin GPS with a street map on the color display. Lo and behold, it was centered on my house, but it was screwed up as I related above. We wrote to them and told them that if they really used that map, people would be getting lost in my area if they used their unit since that road isn't there any more and, oh, about that railroad.. They replied that they'd be in contact with their map source (Looks like Mapquest) and would be sure to get it corrected... Over a year later, it's still inaccurate.
I can understand that it's a huge task to keep things like that updated, but when you get information handed to you about inaccurace, you'd think it'd get fixed within a few months.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"The Taco Bell down the road from me is utterly useless to the 99% of the world's population who doesn't live in my city."
1% of the world's population lives in your city? Why on earth would there be a Taco Bell in Mexico City?
#DeleteChrome