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Discussion on: Technology Must Know When to Say "I Don't Know"

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Thomas H Jones II

They'd need a DB schema extension, for that ...and then someone to populate the new "traffic radio" field's broadcast-area GIS data. ;)

Even still, the value Waze (et. al.) typically brings is greater immediacy and accuracy vice what most traffic radio gets you. Prior to Waze, you usually had to wait until some regular interval for the commercial radio station to air it's traffic segment. This was often only once or twice an hour (and as frequently as every ten minutes on the traffic-specializing local news-only stations). Worse, once you complete the wait for that radio station's traffic-report, the data reported was typically 30+ minutes stale. Translation: saying "check the radio" is probably at least as bad as revising time-estimates based on crowd-sourced current speeds/distance calculations. Even "tune to the metro-area's regional traffic-service frequency" is a hand-wave: while that has immediacy, the data tends to still be of "best guess" nature.