Google is tracking you. Well, they’re not actually tracking you…they’re tracking your cell phone. And only if it’s a smart phone that uses Google Maps with My Location enabled. And they claim it’s completely anonymous. And it’s only in select cities…for now. But no matter what or how, the result is one of the coolest additions to Google Maps since Street View debuted a few years ago.
As someone that spends a considerable amount of time on the road, I really appreciate anything that helps me avoid wasting my time. Google Maps is implementing an awesome new feature appropriately called “traffic”. When you view an area with Google maps, they’ve added a traffic button near the map and satellite buttons. When enabled, it color codes not just the highways of the region you’re looking at, but some secondary and tertiary roads in an easy to interpret “traffic light” motif.
Using GPS velocity data gathered from phones with Google Maps (that also have the My Location feature enabled), Google can infer what the traffic conditions on a road are for the phones presently on that road. Pretty cool, huh? But it gets better. Over time as more data is gathered and traffic trends emerge, you’ll be able to pose a query for the historical traffic patterns on a given day of the week at a given time. So if you know that you have to pick up a pizza on the way home from work every Thursday, you can view the historical traffic data and see if an alternate route might serve you better.
Related posts:
Posted in 
Tags: 
For further proof that technology like this really can save you time, NAVTEQ released results of a study showing that using their traffic based navigation can save drivers (4) days per year in wasted time.
[...] noted a few days ago that a real-time traffic monitoring and trending feature had been added to Google Maps. Today, [...]
[...] encouraging to see a game like Monopoly reinvent itself yet again in order to remain relevant. In yet another use of Google Maps and without adding the complexity associated with so many of today’s best [...]
[...] navigation GPS devices, include voice searches using Google’s Voice recognition technology, real time traffic overlays, photographic satalite imagery, and actual street views where available (see video below). A [...]