If you go to Yahoo's driving directions page, and ask for directions from, say, Pasadena to Santa Monica you will notice a relatively new feature on the lower right side of the resulting graphic: a little button that says "View Traffic".
If you then click that button you will get a graphic display of the current traffic situation around greater LA, including: average speed of cars, in each direction, on most major highways; location of ongoing construction/repair work; and locations of any traffic incidents, including degree of severity.
Such a simple thing, and yet it has already become an indispensable part of my life. Every time I want to drive to the West side now I have to consult this map. I should say that I have found its evaluations to be dead-on.
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Robin adds that Yahoo has added subway-system overlays to their NYC maps, as well.
That service has been around for quite a while. I saw Bob using what must have been sigalert.com in 2000 when I visited him.
Back when I was driving Santa Monica to Pasadena, almost daily, I would consult websites which contained these same graphics. First, it was from the California Transportation Authority (CalTrans) -- which is where I think the information was generated. Then it seemed they farmed it out to a few different services, most of which failed on a six month timescale.
In the end, since I was usually driving Santa Monica->Pasadena in the mornings, and did so hundreds of times, it proved to inform my early drives about the best time to start driving (consistent with a late sleep), or to suggest I work remotely and leave at 11am. In all, experince came to be the best teacher, and I learned easy driving dictums of that route, the 10 to the 110, such that I could tell you which lanes were the good ones to be in at any point on that route. For example, pretty much universally, you want to be in the left-hand lane passing through downtown, to avoid the slowdown associated with the 101 off-ramp. But, after the 101, you have to be a screaming idiot to stay in that lane 1 second longer; get the heck all the way over to the right, because the 5 offramp is coming and on a good day, you're doing 40 there when you could be doing 65 in the right-hand lane (on a bad day, the left-hand lane can be at a dead standstill for a mile before the 5).
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