How much is information about your local traffic worth?

Maybe a lot. Freight-related traffic congestion cost the US as much as $33 billion in 2009.* And that’s not counting the personal cost of lost time, potential safety hazards, or the disruption it can cause a business when people or important cargoes are delayed.

Visual Command Center, our risk visualization and response software, includes two feeds for assessing and monitoring traffic conditions:  U.S. current traffic conditions from Bing Maps, and live traffic cameras from Trafficland. These are useful for routing critical shipments or important visitors, and for assessing risks in various scenarios.

Traffic Conditions
The traffic conditions feed from Bing Map shows the flow of traffic along highways and major roads in more than 70 US metropolitan areas, plus one in Canada. The feature uses color codes (red, yellow, green) to indicate traffic volume.

Color coding shows areas of traffic congestion in this image from Columbus, Ohio.

Seeing traffic visualized in this way can help you assess developing situations. For example, when an expected delivery or guest arrival doesn’t happen on time, security operations staff needs to know: Is the delay caused by heavy traffic, weather, or construction? Or is the cause something else that must be investigated?  The traffic feed can help you confirm or eliminate traffic as a factor.

In an emergency, the traffic feed can also provide information needed to route first responders.  Can a fire truck or ambulance approach the building by the most direct route, or has that route become blocked?  Is traffic moving freely on an alternate route?

Trafficland Cameras

While the traffic conditions feed gives you an overview of traffic movement, sometime there’s no substitute for seeing a particular situation for yourself. The Trafficland cameras let you see on-scene conditions live, with video from over 10,000 traffic cameras in more than 200 cities.

The area above is under a flood alert, shown by the yellow shading. The live camera shows that traffic on the bridge is heavy and moving slowly, possibly indicating water over the road, and the need to choose another route.

This gives you a tool to directly answer urgent questions: What’s going on at the scene of a reported incident? Why does a GPS feed show that an important mobile asset—like a high-value cargo—has stopped moving?

The combination of live traffic conditions and streaming video helps users build a picture of the risks that threaten the things they care about—people, assets, and operations.

* Texas Transportation Institute 2010 Urban Mobility Report