Thursday, March 01, 2007

Los Angeles "Real-Time" Traffic Maps

Everyone loves maps, and everyone loves to know how to avoid traffic. So, here's the best of what people love: online, "real-time" Traffic Maps. Here are some of the choices you have in planning your commute just before heading out the door. The question isn't really which is best, rather, which is most useful.

What do you think?

Sigalert.com: This is the site that was first employed to share traffic times and incidents in the LA City Nerd world. And of course, as SigAlert was a term coined in Los Angeles by the LAPD for the inventor, Lloyd "Sig" Sigmond.

The City's Department of Transportation has an almost complete real-time street traffic system page that rivals the real-time freeway maps listed on this page. What makes it work is ATSAC. Special features like road construction & filming make this City map even more useful & informative, as does the ability for you to zoom into specific neighborhoods or areas of interest. (There are current plans to "ATSAC-ize" the whole City - let's hope sooner than later!)

Google Maps (reaction from LAist & Atwater Village Nerd) now has a feature to look at traffic. According to their site, the traffic feature is not available everywhere, and the colors are simple:

"Green: more than 50 miles per hour
Yellow: 25 - 50 miles per hour
Red: less than 25 miles per hour
Gray: no data currently available"
Yahoo Maps has a traffic feature that is not very clear, but it does show incidents like construction and hazards with limited description. (It's definitely not as clear and easy as some of the others listed.)

My California Traffic uses Google Maps to list their own data in terms of traffic speeds. It's good because you can select specific freeways and save that selection for when you come back to check the status again. It's customizable so you don't get the 710 when all you want is the 405 & the 10.

CommunityView is another effective, lesser known site that has cameras and incidents listed in real time. It's a joint effort of a number of agencies from Metro to LA County to Caltrans.

Traffic Predict uses other sites' information (like those above) and collects over a week's period of time so you can see what things were happening in the past to predict what they might be like now. Curbed LA reviews it here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've used Sigalert.com for quite a while now, and I like it a lot.

Some of the reasons I like it include:

* Actual sensor locations, and exact speeds at each sensor, (not just a color-coded ribbon)

* Incidents marked, with popup full incident reports

* Color-coded text lists of exact speeds for each freeway

* Speeds for HOV lanes, which many other sites omit, on mouseover popups and text lists

* A 4-color speed scale (0-14, 15-34, 35-54, 55+) that's more useful than Google's 3-color (0-24, 25-50, 50+) scheme.

ArakneKnits said...

But is there is a map that shows what traffic is like through Beverly Hills and WeHo??? One little accident on Sunset can slow down traffic for miles.