MapQuest Gets Traffic Information
At SXSW I got to talk to the team at MapQuest about their AS3 API. Despite the old-school impression I had of MapQuest they’re doing some cool things and the AS3 API plays a big part. They’ve put a lot of time and energy into making sure that the Flash community can leverage MapQuest maps inside of their RIAs. They’ve even been working with Universal Mind to perfect the API. Today they announced that they’re adding traffic information to the maps. They even have actual constuction/incident reports so you can see exactly where the problem is.
If you’ve used the MapQuest APIs in your Flash application, I’d love to hear what you think. I’m hoping they’ll add a terrain mode so I can use it for my various GPS hack projects in Flex/AIR.
[tags]Mapquest, AS3, Mapping[/tags]
Posted in Rich Internet Applications
March 18th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Nice, but very similar to Yahoo Traffic and Traffic.com.
Where someone like Mapquest could lead the way is thinking outside the “U.S square”, and offer traffic maps in places like Europe, Australia and elsewhere. Sydney and Melbourne have 5 million and 4 million people respectively, and horrendous traffic.
It would be used by thousands of people here, and it would lead the market because there is currently no alternative.
March 18th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
That’s great. The API is nice except it doesn’t work with AIR (ContextMenu vs NativeMenu = error!!). Despite numerous attempts to contact MapQuest and the developers about this problem it remains unsolved and it appears the API is still at v5.2.0 – the problem version.
Hopefully this problem has been addressed and an updated API (perhaps with traffic?) will be released shortly…
March 23rd, 2008 at 10:38 pm
The traffic thing has been going on their maps for a while.
Unfortunately, any time of the day here in the Seattle area you can go to MapQuest, Microsoft Live Maps, and komotv.com/traffic and get 3 different answers on traffic at the moment, and none are correct! I wish they’d figure out a better way of gathering information.