Norwegian traffic messages in Google Maps
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;)
Screenshot of the prototype
For how long does the points stay on the map? How do I know ehen they were posted?
Nice! I presume that you use http://www20.nrk.no/trafikk/rss/ ? as the source?
Couple of questions: Does the messages disappear over time, or how does it work? Does the messages have any expiery time or will the map end up cluttered with old messages? Or do you use the -element?
And another thing, which I guess you can’t do much about, but that NRK should consider: Why not add the TMC-codes to the RSS so that different icons could be used instead of the generic GM-markers?
The points are just the ones “fed” by the RSS-feed, when they move out of the feed they disappear from the map. However, a useful improvement would have been to “collect” the messages and visualize the temporal aspects with for instance colour gradient or similar. The published date is now included in the pop-up window.