Google Maps Mobile Now Has More Complete Traffic Reports

Google is expanding the traffic information available in Google Maps Mobile to cover all U.S. highways and arterial roads when data is available.

This app has offered traffic reports on major highways for quite some time, but is now including many more roads in this service.

Choosing the "Traffic" option colors the streets to correspond to the speed of traffic: green is free sailing, yellow is medium congestion, red is heavy congestion, and red/black is stop-and-go traffic.

It Never Hurts to Help
Users of the version of Google Maps for smartphones contribute to collecting this traffic data.

According to a post on Google's blog:

When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.

Get It Now
There are versions of  Google Maps Mobile for many smartphones, and they are all free.

To learn more, or to download this software, go to Google's website.

Source: Google and Google