"Live" Traffic Data Often Isn't Timely

This is a screen capture I made while sitting stopped in heavy traffic. I think by the time I made this screen capture I had been crawling through a construction area for at least five minutes. In this particular instance the map never showed a delay. Other times a delay is shown (the blue line becoming red) but it is very late notice — by the time the map shows the delay you’re well into it.

It might help to “zoom out” the 3d view to give a longer view ahead, especially on highways so that the warning of slow traffic ahead would come into view sooner & maybe let folks pull off and take side streets. A very nice feature might be to notice delays and attempt to reschedule a charging stop to “wait out” the delay.

Apple Maps knew about the delay, and even had an estimate for how long it would take to get through the slow area.

I think it would be a great topic for a blog post to explain how the live traffic data works and to set our expectations for what we’ll see (is the problem that the data is “self-generated and there just aren’t enough folks using ABRP or do the “owners”/aggregators of the charge huge sums for really timely data, or ???).