I know that Google Maps for the iPhone lets you see traffic data in certain areas, but it is very limited by the quality and quantity of available data. With the huge number of iPhones and there wide geographic dispersion and with its GPS and “always on” internet capabilities it should be pretty easy to to actually capture traffic data with an iPhone app. This data could then be shared and distributed back to other iphone apps.
There have been other GPS’s with this approach, but it would pretty simple to create a simple app that has a “Traffic Start” button and a “Traffic End” button that would then use the GPS coordinates and the time between the two points to calculate the location and amount of congestion. This very small packet of data could then be sent to a traffic data base (and maybe validated by other reports) and then retransmitted back to the other worthy iPhone users.
It would have to be something you could do while driving so I am envisioning a very simple screen tap to turn on and off. Also it would take some data finess and number crunching on the server side, but wouldn’t it be cool!
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