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

[siderea]

Was just thinking something similar: why aren't calendar apps smart enough to book commutes for themselves? Like, if one books an appointment at one's dentist on a day one has already booked oneself at work, and if one has locations attached to those appointments, why can't the calendar pop up a dialog, "Calculate commute time?" and if you authorize it too, it talks to google maps or whatever, and then books the appropriate amount of travel time onto the calendar as an appointment, and sets one's default notification for such things on it, so one gets pinged "Leave for dentist in the next 15 minutes" or whatever.

It could even, at T = commute duration * -2 from the appointment, go check realtime data about traffic conditions, and adjust accordingly, with notification, e.g., "Traffic on I93 north of here sucks, commute adjusted 10 minutes earlier".