A traffic mashup

Back in the last century when I was at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, we built one of the first online traffic maps. It definitely wasn't the first even in the local market -- a local tech development firm had already built one as a demonstration. We considered using theirs, didn't like their terms, and assigned a programmer to create our own. It took some time, some socket-level Perl programming, some artwork and some creative uses of ImageMagick. MNDOT was happy to provide the data. A few weeks later we had it online.

That traffic map has been rebuilt several times over the years and is still around, but it's not any better and in fact is not as good as the original.

Today the climate is different. There's a whole genre of website, often developed quickly by an individual, using a technique called "mashup" in which Web services from a number of directions are combined into a single result. Adrian Holovaty's ChicagoCrime.org is an example.

I discovered that someone is building a mashup of traffic data, Google's mapping interface, and Google's Adsense revenue program at www.minneapolistrafficmap.com. I don't know who's doing it (the "about" page is blank, and the GoDaddy domain registration is cloaked). But it looks like the kind of thing that an entrepreneurial programmer could whack together in his/her spare time and, because of AdSense, create a small personal revenue stream.

The mashup actually has much more detailed information than the Star Tribune's map.

And I see that 10 years later, MNDOT still doesn't have any pavement sensors in the northeast quadrant, despite the notoriety of the I-694/I-35E intersection as a favorite place for trucks to tip or jackknife in winter weather. Fortunately I don't drive there any more.