Google Maps track traffic to help race-goers avoid jams

Date Published: 25-Jul-2011

By Dara Bradley

Google Maps has added a new feature to help race-goers to avoid what it calls the annual ‘Galway Carmageddon’ of traffic jams en route to Ballybrit for the Summer racing festival this week.

The company has added a new traffic layer to its Google Maps service which will give regular updates on the traffic situation in the city all this week.

The feature shows live traffic information on motorways, and national and other large roads – using a colour-coded scale from green to red it points out how quickly or slowly traffic is moving.

The information is constantly updated based on traffic events from the last five or 10 minutes.

The Google Maps feature also shows traffic predictions based on previous conditions for the time.

When a user chooses a day and a time, Google Maps takes previous traffic information and estimates what traffic conditions are likely to be during that period.

If people use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled phones, Google can combine their speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around the city at any given time, to get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions.

Read more in today’s Connacht Sentinel