Yahoo! Hacks

Monitor Your Commute

Let Yahoo! Local point out construction, accidents, and other potential slow spots on your route.

If you’ve ever been stuck in an inexplicable traffic jam, you know how important information can be. Just knowing the reason behind a slowdown can help you estimate how much longer you’ll be stuck and make some sense of the sea of cars surrounding you. With a little planning and research, you might be able to avoid those trouble spots entirely.

Scout Your Route

To get a general sense of traffic in your area before you leave the house, try looking up your city at Yahoo! Maps. Browse to http://maps.yahoo.com/traffic and plug in your city. You’ll see a map that includes any known construction areas and traffic incidents, along with the general speed of the routes. Figure 2-52 shows the traffic around San Francisco and southern Marin County.

Figure 2-52. San Francisco Bay area traffic

The squares on the map indicate areas with construction and triangles with exclamation points indicate a traffic incident. You can get more detail by hovering over these icons. Clicking the icon gives you even more information, as shown in Figure 2-53.

Figure 2-53. Traffic incident detail

As you can see from Figure 2-53, the information won’t always tell you when an incident will be over, but at ...