Rapidly Expanding Trafficland.com Helps Travelers Choose Roads

Trafficland.com is a web page that allows people to look up a major city and view live video of traffic on all of the highways and commuting routes in the area. A first step selection of a city brings up a view of the locations of all video cameras. A second step allows the selection of all video cameras of interest. Trafficland's service allows road travelers to prepare for problems and select the best route to their destination. Used along with Trafficland's media partners:

NAVTEC's Traffic.com, which provides route information and traffic alerts via e-mailed advisories and a free telephone number and

WEATHERBUG.com which provides up-to-date weather information for a city

Traveler's never had more live information at their fingertips. This makes Bluetooth and other internet capable devices such as PDAs and wireless telephones more useful in a car. It helps commuters plan when to travel. It could be a lifesaver to the many truckers and other delivery vehicles on the road that travel routes through many cities.

Trafficland is working with the transportation departments of many states in the United States including Washington, Arizona, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, several cities in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Denmark and the United Kingdom. One of the neat features Trafficland.com provides is an icon and code so that developers can add their capability to their web pages. This means that users of their service can use their favorite homepages to get access to traffic information without extended searches through government sponsored web pages.

According to the corporate web pages, Trafficland.com signed an agreement to deliver live traffic video for television broadcast with CNN in September of 2007. They've also signed agreements to provide CCTV broadcasts. The patent on their video aggregation algorithm is pending approval. If their growth as shown on the Yahoo Finance page follows Traffic.com's (a publicly traded company which according to Charles Schwab was recently purchased by Nokia and a media partner) then Trafficland.com should expect success.

I think the services Trafficland.com are likely to expand to other states and countries. Having used Trafficland.com in its early stages in Seattle to select which of the half-dozen partial routes I should take home from work, I know it has value. With no traffic on the road, I can typically get home from Seattle in a half-hour. This contrasts with worst-case commutes that lasted well over an hour and a half. The benefits can only increase as the number of cameras installed on the highway expands and the more cities added to Trafficland.com's services. Use by police, fire, and other aid units may speed their arrival and allow them to help in difficult transportation situations, especially as their vehicles have internet devices installed in their vehicles.