This traffic report is brought to you by Twitter

Last night I spotted a road closure on my way back from football and fired off a quick twitter message in case any of my friends were driving in the west end. What a nice citizen I am ;). This morning I find out some clever people have created a traffic report newsfeed that twitter-ers can post to. So, instead of just helping friends we can help our whole city. Pretty cool.

The site is called Commuter Feed. You can post traffic problems you spot by texting twitter (21212 in Canada) with “@commuter YYZ” at the beginning of your message. For example, “@commuter YYZ A truck full of chicken have escaped all over the DVP!”.

YYZ is the code for Toronto – switch out your airport code for a different city.

There is one fatal flaw to Commuter Feed… As Mark says: “wait, but http://www.commuterfeed.com… doesn’t PUBLISH it’s feed on Twitter….um, I’m supposed to find wifi when on the road?”

2 Comments

• 
  Ron February 12, 2008 at 3:17 pm

  Thanks for the great writeup!

  Unfortunately, Twitter’s application interface prevents us at Commuter Feed from flooding the service with reposted traffic reports.

  Commuter Feed actually has an RSS feed for every city we support, so to receive text messages of the RSS feed you can use such services as Pingie.com, RSSFWD.com, or even Yahoo or Google alerts.

  Thanks!
  Ron
• 
  Pema February 12, 2008 at 3:24 pm

  Thanks for the great service Ron!

  Subscribing to the RSS feed sounds promising. Thanks for the tip.