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Highway technology needs
I suppose that having this will help bring about better methods to deal with the disaster known as the SoCal freeway system, but by then we'll have even more of a mess. What I need, at a minimum is a live feed from the local online freeway maps in my car. It would be nice to anonymously identify traffic patterns on the major roads as well. I know the freeways and how they connect, I know a lot of the major roads. I also know how to do Ventura, LA and San Diego in other ways. All I need is a sort of high level view of all the freeways and major roads. On radio, traffic has become high frequency, low detail. The binary concept of a SigAlert is pointless because that's all they talk about. No useful data from the area is provided. I've used friends to help vector me in recent conditions. On Monday afternoon I ran into a mess on the 405 just south of John Wayne Airport. I called a friend to check on the backup distance and decided to forgo a trip across Irvine to the 5 since it was only a 2 mile backup. Had it been a bit longer, I'd have been on the surface streets heading east and south, avoiding traffic and eventually hitting 5 or tripping over the San Diego Freeway again. It's a game once you know the conditions in front of you. You need to know where on the road the blockage is and get on the opposite side and measure progress. If you're going to lose more than 15 minutes or so, you need to know the alternatives. Unfortunately, we learn these kinds of things because we've got too few of these high speed arteries and too many tourists. I decided to wait until Friday to come up and used the 405 (aiming for the mid-day break). I ran into several little sag and go patterns but was generally moving well from San Diego all the way through into LA (they're unmistakable and lead to pile on behavior). I hit the LAX area around 12:30 and landed in what looked like a typical mid-morning morning snarl when I lived down there. A few minutes after landing in the mess, I heard a radio report of an accident near El Segundo. That was useless because we'd already gone past it without problems and the real problem was a few miles north on the LAX s-curve. It ultimately cleared by the time we got north of Marina Freeway (as I figured it would) but it would have been nice to know for sure.
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