Google Maps Will Show You Side Street Traffic

By: on August 27th, 2009 Category: Design Tips & Tricks

Design Inside

I know this isn’t strictly “Design News”, but it is great news since most of us that live and drive in Chicago spend quite a bit of time sitting in traffic.  My GPS has basically stated that I have averaged 12MPH!  To help everyone save a bit of time in their life, Google has now enabled arterial traffic on their Google maps services.  You are probably asking yourself, what the heck is arterial traffic?  Well, it’s basically side street traffic.  They can display this traffic data through what is crowdsourcing, or taking the GPS coordinates of most mobile devices that are running Google Maps.  For instance, if you are in your car driving down the street, and have Google maps open and running on your iPhone, Google knows where you are, how fast you are going,  etc.  They can then take this information and combine it with other user data and display it on Google maps.  This crowdsourced data allows others to look at the map and determine if they should go out on the road, or stay at the coffee shop for another cup of coffee and wait for traffic to die down.  Pretty amazing stuff that will help all of us save a little time in our day.

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