The following was posted on one of our internal forums at work, and I thought that this is the kind of thing that members of this newsgroup are interested in.
The Highways Agency in the UK have just launched a free service offering real time video footage from roadside cameras so users can check for traffic jams on their mobile phones. The service trial has begun with trial starts with 100 cameras on the M25, M1, M6, M4, M5, M40 M42, M54, M60, A1M, M61 and will extend to the full Highways Agency CCTV network by the end of the year.
I've just given it a try and it took 5 minutes to set up using the following process:
my good deed for the dayIt's a shame that there is an anti-motorcyclist feeling - some bikers do live up to the stereotype and give the rest a bad name but most are decent...
1. Text 'traffic mxdata' to 60070 and you are texted back a pbuttword 2. Go to wap.traffictv.co.uk 3. Install application and insert pbuttword 4. A trafficmaster 1 style map of the UK road network is loaded 5. Browse the map to your chosen road and TV cameras are shown or shown on the map 6. Select the required TV camera and a live image from the traffic camera is shown. 7. That's it.
I've given this a test and it all works well. I think this would be a useful application for a pbuttenger in a car when RDS or Trafficmaster or some other system has warned you of delays ahead, such that you can check how slow the traffic is ahead and whether the jams has already cleared.
Details of the system are in the Sunday Times 2 this weekend. The free system gives you just the camera pictures, but a related system called Traffic TV 3 is the map based application for your mobile that gives you live "at a glance" real-time Trafficmasterú information as well as CCTV camera pictures from the entire UK trunk and motorway network. (Excluding Ireland). This costs £3.33-month but got a 5 star rating in What Mobile 4 in July 2005.
