Google Traffic is now more useful
Aug 26, 2009 google, gps navigation, gps software
Google Maps can now show you live traffic information on side streets just as it did for highways. Currently it is only available on select cities – but as Google completes its world domination more cities are sure to follow.
To see detail traffic conditions at street level just zoom-in and look for the “Traffic” button.
But how do they do it? It is called crowdsourcing road congestion data.
If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that’s exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers.
Yes, you’re concerned about privacy. Google “says” they use anonymous speed and location information and in addition they take an extra step and find the start and end points of every trip and permanently delete that data so that even Google ceases to have access to it.
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