almost helpful

[cellio]

My (Android) phone alerts me when traffic is bad near me. This can be handy at the end of the day because I work downtown. Except... it's telling me about traffic on roads I don't use to get home. Sure, there's spillover so it's not unhelpful, but it'd be great if I could tell it -- maybe by gesturing on a map -- what paths I care about, so it could tell me about those ones.

Does anybody reading this know of an app that does that, or a way to get Google Maps to do it? It needs to be fire and forget; I don't want to have to open the map app to look for red lines on it.

It feels like all the information is already there, if only my phone were making use of it.

(This would also let me know before I leave in the morning if traffic is still bad at the other end. At that time I don't really need extra information about traffic near my house; I need it 3-5 miles away.)

Comments

[jducoeur]

Hmm. That makes some sense -- but it's pretty rare for me to ask for *directions* to somewhere on the subway. Locate it on Maps, sure, and sometimes I'll locate it on Maps on the desktop, then send that pin over to my phone. But actually ask for directions in the app? That's actually more annoying than helpful when I'm doing subway-plus-walk most of the time -- I rarely *need* it, it's annoying having my pocket talking at me, and I don't especially want to have my phone in-hand as I walk.

(And honestly, I've had enough bad experiences with walking directions on Google Maps over the years that it's somewhat trained me not to do that -- combination of GPS problems in the mid-city, and the fact that walking mode in the app was just plain confusing and bad for a fair while. It's better now, but it was annoying enough for long enough that I developed some distaste for it.)

[hudebnik]

By "directions" I don't mean real-time spoken directions -- I use that mostly when driving solo to somewhere unfamiliar, and have never used it for public transit -- but just looking up in advance the possible routes and schedules to get from X to Y. That tells Google Maps that you're interested in going from X to Y by public transit. I actually do that fairly often, as NYC has enough different subway lines, with local/express distinctions and intermittent track closures, that it's not always obvious which stop of which line is the best for your trip right now.

[jducoeur]

Makes sense, but I think that's Boston vs. NYC thing -- since our subway is a much simpler hub-and-spoke system, there is usually only one sensible, obvious way to get somewhere...