Los Angeles Traffic Cam brings live gridlocks to your cellphone

We have all ideas (okay, so we know it for a fact) that the Los Angeles Traffic Cam was designed for those living in LA, but we can't help but imagine how drivers in less congested cities could use this to make their own daily commute not seem so bad. NBC4 and 3rd Dimension have teamed up to beam out live video and nearly live still shots from some 270 LA-area traffic cameras to those with compatible mobiles, and being that it's ad-supported, the whole thing is completely free to end users. Of course, for all you know, they could just loop a clip of gridlocked traffic during rush hour and call it reality. Sadly, said idea would almost work.

[elgee02 Posted Jun 25th 2008 2:18AM]

I wonder how expansive this is... I mean is it just LA county or does this also include Orange County? Inland Empire? Cajon Pass and the High Desert?

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 25th 2008 3:28AM]

I just downloaded this program and test drove it for a few minutes. The user interface is pretty average, just a numerical list of freeways that you can click on that reveal cross streets to freeways to click on for the cams. They could have done a lot more with this program or integrated it into Google Mobile Maps somehow, that would have been better. I'll probably forget that it's on my phone and never use it.

As far as the coverage. It appears to just be most of LA County with the BIG exception of everything north of the San Fernando Valley. Strange. No 14 Freeway listed at all and nothing on I-5 North of the 170 Freeway I-5 Split. Not good.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 4th 2008 9:42AM]

That's strange though how Cal-Trans, or LA Metro (which runs buses, trains and subways as well as the LA freeway ITS system) never had a real mobile solution until now.
I grew up in the land of the SigAlert but live in Atlanta now where we're getting our first taste of ramp meters and such.

But we've had a mobile version of the Georgia Navigator site for years here where you can go and view not only cameras, but also see the message boards over the freeways and different traffic incidents in text form. you can also personalize it to your commute habits. http://myganav.com/www/pda/

There are even RSS feeds now that I have plugged into RSS Hub on my TYTN2 where I can just see whats going on with I75 before I leave work.
Come on CalTrans, get with it!!

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 25th 2008 2:00PM]

Yeah, this doesn't seem too useful as Darren Murph points out that traffic is always gridlocked in LA haha.

"We have all ideas that the..."
Is that a typo or a figure of speech I've never heard before?

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 28th 2008 2:42AM]

This doesn't cover Orange County