Twitraffic, the innovative traffic app which uses real time input from road users via Twitter to give live traffic information, has launched an update to include journey planning features.
As unhappy road users are often the ones taking to social networks to report problems before the official feeds do, Twitraffic selects and applies complex algorithms to filter out and publish relevant information. Four live tweets per second are processed – a lot of people tweet about UK traffic!
“When the data is compared to the UK government’s Highways Agency data, Twitraffic reports incidents, on average, 7.1 minutes before,” says Ross Targett, who designed the app. Of 200,000 tweets processed, only 4,000 are deemed relevant enough to use.
Twitraffic combines the best features of other traffic apps available by providing:
- Filters for incidents & road works.
- A simple traffic summary detailing current traffic.
- Lookup any recent tweets on a road of interest.
- A map detailing current traffic.
- Push notifications for roads you subscribe to. This ensures you’re alerted to traffic the moment it develops
The new update includes a journey planning feature – you can put in start and end points, and times of travel for regular journeys, and push notifications will be sent to your device of disruptions along the way.
Available on Apple and Android app stores, Twitraffic costs just £1.49 but is available free until the 21st September.
This new development in the software builds on the suite of technologies which enable their customers to offer their end users information in a variety of ways. “Our customers are always looking for innovation in the ways they can improve their end users’ customer experience”, said Chris Metcalfe, Managing Director of telent’s Technology Solutions business. “We use our engineering capability across multiple markets and technologies to come up with the best solution.” One example of this is the ‘BUStop’ app, available in the App Store, which mines information from the TFL system, Countdown and delivers bus Real Time Information for each of the 19,000 bus stops and 700 routes in London.
With annual revenues of over £300 million, telent has decades of experience in supplying a broad range of network and communications services. Today, the privately-held company employs approximately 1,500 people and has an engineering field force that covers the entire UK. Customers include: BT, Virgin Media, Sky, Arqiva, Vodafone, Merseyside Fire & Rescue, the Metropolitan Police, Transport for London, Network Rail, Train Operators, and London Ambulance Service.
