The popularity of traffic messages visualized in a map is increasing – especially with the advent of GPS enabled devices supporting RDS/TMC. In Norway there are only one or two businesses that provides such messages – although the information has been available for several year (natural language over FM-radio, newer; natural language over XML).

In a response to this NRK now released their traffic messages in RDS/TMC for every device supporting this. When looking at their page I found out that they additionally, actually delivers the same messages georefered with lat/lon and timestamps. So, while having a slightly slow day at the office I decided to prototype a system that retrieves the feed (serverside), parse it, and serves it (or part of it) in JSON and then visualize it in a map.

The solution can be found here. As always the system is not intended to be bulletproof, so be nice! It updates the data every 60 seconds using AJAX/JS, whether that is necessary is another discussion:)

And, yeah, I know P4 has a similar solution, and I ain’t gonna compete nor compare;)