traffic in google maps

vicM

Didn't know this feature existed, turned on maps on the way home today and saw the traffic icon on the bottom left..tapped it and got am overview with traffic situation.
Red for heavy, orange for slow I guess and green for clear
Should be handy

Zagato

vicM wrote: »

Didn't know this feature existed, turned on maps on the way home today and saw the traffic icon on the bottom left..tapped it and got am overview with traffic situation.
Red for heavy, orange for slow I guess and green for clear
Should be handy

Yeah apparently there is heavy traffic along all the main routes into cities at rush hour :-)

More seriously, I don't find it very helpful. Have you seen the navigation widget for the error to a saved destination, which looks like a traffic light, and tells you what traffic is like on the route there at whatever time you're looking at your homescreen

vicM

Zagato wrote: »

vicM wrote: »

Didn't know this feature existed, turned on maps on the way home today and saw the traffic icon on the bottom left..tapped it and got am overview with traffic situation.
Red for heavy, orange for slow I guess and green for clear
Should be handy

Yeah apparently there is heavy traffic along all the main routes into cities at rush hour :-)

More seriously, I don't find it very helpful. Have you seen the navigation widget for the error to a saved destination, which looks like a traffic light, and tells you what traffic is like on the route there at whatever time you're looking at your homescreen

actually that's what I'm talking about! seemed quite accurate too..wonder how does google get this info

Zagato

vicM wrote: »

actually that's what I'm talking about! seemed quite accurate too..wonder how does google get this info

I think I mean a different widget which is in the widget section of the app drawer in ICS, or if you long press your home screen and then select widgets pre-ICS. It's called Traffic, anyway it just tells you what the traffic is like on your presaved route without you having to go into maps.

ULMarc

vicM wrote: »

actually that's what I'm talking about! seemed quite accurate too..wonder how does google get this info

From the drivers on the road using Google Maps. It determine's iit by the speed of the cars.

Kenno90

ULMarc wrote: »

From the drivers on the road using Google Maps. It determine's iit by the speed of the cars.

So what happens to people walking down the street who are using the directions .

nedd

Kenno90 wrote: »

So what happens to people walking down the street who are using the directions .

those people should have "Walking Navigation" on.

kirving

ULMarc wrote: »

From the drivers on the road using Google Maps. It determine's iit by the speed of the cars.

TomTom, Garmin and Nokia Sat Nav all have this feature too, for quite a while. While an Android and Nokia phonea can.recieve traffic info over the internet, most sat navs can't, so they either use FM signal or a digital system to recieve traffic info.

What this means is that the traffic info provided to all these systems isn't solely supplied by a few Android users.

I don't know 100%, but I'm fairly sure that that the induction loops which have been.buried in the road over the past few years to adjust lights also link into a central system, along with traffic cameras, and AA reports to provide traffic info. Mapping providers can then use this data.

There's a thread about it on the GPS forum.

vicM

the inductors on the roads are normally near lights and round-a-bouts and don't think this would be on long stretches like Navan road. also doubt they would solely use crowd sourcing though this would be useable with something else

croo

vicM wrote: »

actually that's what I'm talking about! seemed quite accurate too..wonder how does google get this info

I wondered about this too. My first thought was others using google maps but then I noticed something. I often travel the M4/6 to/from Dublin, in the mornings I often switch on the navigation to see what traffic is like on the Dublin end. If I'm late I might need to take the toll road but otherwise I will take the old (N4/6) road and this necessitates me setting the avoid toll roads for the trip. What I've noticed is that when I check this, I always get "grey" for the traffic on the N4. Now grey indicates there is no traffic report. If the data was sourced by cars using google navigation I think it unlikely that it was always the case that there are people using google nav on the M4 but not the N4!

After saying that I do not know where the information does come from, but I doubt it is from current users ... which would be a good source!