TinyTraffic was written by Tony McNamara as an aid to navigating the infamous Seattle traffic. Seattle's traffic is worse than most due partially to a region-wide persistent infection with socialist liberals who view cars as inherently evil and partially due to geographic constraints caused by numerous large bodies of water scattered around.
Well-organized drivers can either check the DOT or radio or television websites for the DOT traffic map. The Dept. Of Transportation put sensors under the freeways in many places, which helps them determine where traffic is stopped and where it's wide open. This data is then processed into a graphic map and made available to the public.
Unfortunately, it's also very high-res and simply won't fit on even a standard VGA screen. And most drivers don't have a connected hi-res laptop running beside them in the car. So they rely on... the radio.
Seattle radio stations compete with each-other through the use of a flock of aircraft, both copters and airplanes. However, the reports are sporadic on the music stations, and very short (under a minute) on the news stations, partly because they occur every ten minutes and, were they any longer, there wouldn't be time for ads and news. But a consequence is that the typical traffic report will cover an area twenty miles from you, regardless of where you are, and the next one will cover another irrelevant region or perhaps, if it was an impressive collision as so often happens when Seattle women try to drive, chat on the handheld-cellphone, paint their toenails, and drink a hot Starbucks latte simultaneously, the same incident several reports running.
... which means that your area may not get covered for 30 minutes, probably too late to change your route.
I took a consulting gig diagonally across the map from my home. Actually, both the gig and the home are off the corners, so the commute doesn't even fit. But the point is, I needed faster access to the traffic report. And so I built a server and data parser to provide it.
TinyTraffic (or Wap_Traffic) checks the WADOT ftp site on demand but no more than once every three minutes (per their request of developers in general) for the raw data collected by their sensors. It parses it and then plugs the results into an encoded graphic map of the Seattle area. This is then served, along with the parsed messages, to the incoming connection.
It's a bit more complex than it sounds, but isn't too bad.
I am a big believer in both Open-Source and commercial software and services. Obviously I earn my keep working for closed shops, and I fully support them. Innovation must be rewarded in a way that allows the innovators to survive. And with more complex products and with anything that incurs risk of liability or is mission-critical, your choices are typically to either gain or hire the knowledge at a rather steep cost and investment, or to rely on commercial software where the support costs are amortized across many people.
However, TinyTraffic is not such an application or service. The time invested was relatively small compared to some other projects I've done (including open-source such as work on Plucker or the entire cycle of Picture Pager), the server load on my system should be minimal due to the small bandwidth per transaction, and the value to Seattle high. So this falls under the umbrella of high value to the world without having required massive investment up-front.
And TrafficGauge came along after I finished V1 of TinyTraffic. They sell a dedicated crappy monochrome low-rez device and charge a monthly fee for access, and don't even provide the text alerts available from the DOT. Even if I had not already been providing TinyTraffic free, I would have to now just to challenge such an evil venture.
So enjoy TinyTraffic. It's far better than the competition (free, color, text alerts, works on your phone rather than you having to carry a dedicated device, higher-resolution, no commitment or subscription).
TinyTraffic is accessed via the links below. The controls are by query string only, so that they may be saved as part of the bookmark. The choices are:
The mode= option may be important. TinyTraffic outputs HTML (Valid Transitional 4.01) if your browser appears to support HTML.
If not, and if it does support WML, or if the mode=WML string is used, Valid WML is output instead.
This may be very useful for some cell phones that otherwise cannot render the site. But it also provides the advantage of displaying
the messages and status in a separate Card of the Deck, which cannot be done in HTML.
For screen shots, see the Screenshots page.
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