Re: OT: Freeway Traffic

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Author: Victor Odhner
Date:  
To: plug-discuss
Subject: Re: OT: Freeway Traffic
The good news: It's now at az511.com

More good news: It's a php site.

More good news: It's really pretty well done,
... as long as you have flash.

The bad news: You must have flash to view it.
My primary browser is foxfire on Win98, and it
can't use flash yet. But the site works great with
Mozilla. I haven't tried it from Linux.
I can even take firefox to this URL:
<http://www.az511.com/RoadwayConditions/closuresrestrictions.php>
and the closures/restrictions map appears for a moment,
THEN I'm referred to "getflash.html".

More bad news: The map-based highway conditions display
still has some event icons hiding other event icons.
They should zoom in until they've got room to
place the icons next to one another instead of
stacking them up.

In other words, they are just trying too hard to be
spiffy. But information is there if you know how to
dig for it. I just go to the "all events" link,
which brings up a text document describing all
upcoming issues. Oh wait -- yes, this is one page
that does not require flash! Here's the URL:
<http://www.az511.com/RoadwayConditions/events/maricopaEventsRep.html>

... THAT works fine with Firefox and no flash.

And finally, ... well, this is monday morning
quarterbacking, no way to fix it now, but it would
have been nice if they'd kept the old URL valid
for a while.

Oh, more GOOD news: The name of the site reflects
that you can dial 511 on your cell phone and
use voice querying to learn about highway conditions.
My wife tried it once. First it asked what category
she wanted, she replied "highway conditions" I think.
To the next question she said "Fifty-one", and she
got a nice summary of current isses on SR51.
So if your pronunciation meets with the system's
expectations (I don't know how flexible it is),
you can do a query without using the keypad to
navigate through the menus.

Vic

Don Calfa wrote:
> What happened to azfms.com?
>
> IMO, that was one of the better variants of the
> Phoenix Traffic watch sites.
>
> Last time I checked, they even updated the map
> for the 51 and one of the only sites with the
> complete 101.

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