Get Stuck In Traffic, Or Just Watch It On Your iPhone
Traffic Cameras ($0.99) by News 12 Networks is a traffic camera viewing app. Like other apps of this sort, it allows you to view current traffic conditions nearby and, hopefully avoid the rush hour mess. By viewing the freeway’s upcoming traffic situation, you have the opportunity to decide to take a different route or wait out the storm, as it were.
This app boasts “the most comprehensive collection of traffic cameras for mobile devices.” You can choose to view traffic cameras from eight different countries and each country will have any number of state, providences, regions or districts. Within each country’s section, you may have a lot of choices or you may only have a few. Within the United States, in California, for example there are only two cities listed, Sacramento (where I live) and San Diego.
The features include auto-refresh and location finder. You can add certain cameras to your favorites list.
While I enjoy watching traffic cameras because it feels like I am legally spying on the world, I would not recommend it for practical use. The cameras tend to only reload every five minutes or so and there are not quite enough in any given road trip to really gage the traffic conditions.
But, if you just like to voyeuristically watch the streets for interesting activity, this app offers a lot of different cameras to access. I literally watched an accident being cleaned up in Phoenix, Arizona on the westbound 10 freeway, just east of 51st avenue. Well, it was either a traffic accident, or road work. The view is so small, it is hard to tell what is going on.
The app has a lot of bugs to work out. For example, there were a number of times when there was no image available, or a link was broken. In my very city, the images were all from 2004 and they would not refresh or update, which makes me wonder how many other traffic cameras that don’t include the date are just random shots from years ago, posing as current traffic conditions.
I also experienced an issue where my app would not load the countries back. It seemed to be stuck in New Zealand. I was able to fix the problem by exiting the app and closing it out of multi-tasking. Another time, it froze up when I was trying to load a camera. It needs some technical attention.
At a mere $0.99 it is actually worth a spin. It is priced the same as most of the others like it and it isn’t hard to figure out. If you like to traffic peep, this may be the app for you.
