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.