As my wife was driving back home after dropping my boys off for a week at sleep-away camp, she hit the worst traffic you can hit. Cars were stopped dead on a divided mountain road, and people were getting out of their cars since no one was going anywhere.
She called me up to check traffic online through GPS Insight (since she has a device on her car (named “nav2″).
I got “directions” from our directions dashlet, then turned on Traffic :
Directions from my wife's car to mine
I was able to instantly pull up the fact that there was an accident 3 miles ahead of her which had the road completely closed, and it was estimated to be closed another 3 hours.
Pulling up crash data from Google Traffic within GPS Insight's directions functionality
Then I pulled up her location and recent 30 minutes of history within our 3D mapping (Google Earth):
Pull up Nav2's current status and recent history
She said people were turning around and driving on the shoulder of the road BACKWARDS to get to the nearest off-ramp. I told her it was .5 miles.
My wife, .5 miles from the nearest offramp
She called me back and told me everyone was going the wrong way down the on-ramp to get over to the other side of the highway.
Within 3 minutes she had escaped a really bad traffic-jam, before it got jammed up too much behind her.
Then she needed alternate directions which I was able to get her instantly, as well as watch her progress on a route only about 20 miles out of the way.
Which sure beats waiting in traffic for 3 hours.
And a quick right-click “directions from/directions to” in Google Earth tells me she’ll be home in 39 minutes.
Directions/ETA and recent history
So I can fire up the grill and have dinner ready when they get home. As I was typing this, she texted me the same thing:
Better go make dinner
Now I really better make dinner.
Rob.
