Saturday, October 21, 2006

Improved Seattle (WSDOT) traffic flow for mobile devices

My wife found that the Washington State Department of Transportation started creating traffic flow maps for mobile devices for the Greater Seattle (Puget Sound) area. One problem though, the page layout isn't ideal for most of our commuting; the maps are split across our routes. Downloading two pages on your blackberry? No thanks.

The solution? Build our own HTML page that references the all the small images so all of the images are loaded with one page. Then create links to the other reference pages such as the travel times.

Do you want to use our Seattle traffic flow maps for mobile or wireless devices? Just use the link you like better:

http://traffic.paulcooley.com
http://traffic.lauracooley.com

Happy Commuting in the Puget Sound area!
Paul Cooley

Seattle (WSDOT) traffic flow for handheld devices

5 comments:

Laura said...

Thank you honey

Paul Cooley said...

Anything for you ...

Anonymous said...

Help me understand why the current one doesn't work for you? Do you commute from Federal Way to Everett?

Paul Cooley said...

To be honest, the WSDOT traffic information works great! And I like the implementation and the various forms of data, kudos to all the people working on it.

I personally actually commute from Kenmore to Bellevue. Which crosses the boundary of two of the mobile maps.

However, my wife works in technical sales. This implies a non-regular commute, going at different times. This is a common scenario for her. The resulting web page allows her to get a view of the Puget Sound area in a single page load. Browsing on mobile devices is more cumbersome and although the images are available, it is slightly less convenient.

Does that make sense?

Another thought of the Day (actually it was yesterday's thought) for me is it would be great to have RSS feeds of the traffic incidents and other traffic data. Then the "web 2.0" users could extend the functionality on their dime in every shape of their imagination? Maybe this data is already available, but I've looked and cannot find it.

Laura said...

The less browsing while driving is best. One page to get all the info I need is great. Now if we could just get info on 522. :)

I love the RSS feed idea. That would helpful too.