Traffic Woes

It's the rainy season and in KL that means one thing: SuperDuper Traffic Jams on the way home in the evening. Aside from KL being "organically" grown without any holistic planning, I reckon that drivers could be better equipped with traffic information. Relying on the ITIS will probably lead you nowhere, unfortunately.

I was interested to find that Google Maps has a "traffic" feature which is supposed to show you traffic conditions at key intersections, coded to red, yellow and green. Unfortunately KL is not covered yet. This would really be helpful for long suffering KL drivers.

An interesting source of traffic data may be the mobile phone operators - they have data on how fast mobile phones move from cell to cell, so it's a simple matter of matching it with a map of existing towers (which Google Maps already has) to get a halfway decent map of traffic.

Google Maps wins by having more traffic through its service, and the telcos win by having Google pay them for data.

And of course KL drivers win by knowing which shortcut to take to avoid losing 2 hours of their precious lives every day to traffic!

Now the only thing after that would be to prevent accidents by people gazing at their mobile phones while driving!! :)