Traffic · eighty-five cities, read live
How fast it is moving.
Right now.
Eighty-five cities on one desk, on six continents — the twelve largest of each by the size of its metropolitan area, plus the four this desk was already watching. Two of them publish a live road speed a browser can read without a key: New York, per stretch of road with the geometry of the stretch arriving alongside the reading, and Madrid, per sensor. Both are drawn on the city’s own published boundary, because a road you cannot place is not a road, and every figure beside them is arithmetic over those same readings.
Twenty of the other eighty-four publish it too, and this page said for a long time that none of them did — because nobody had looked past the English-language portals. Berlin, Bogotá and a dozen more were found by searching in their own languages; every one was called before it was believed. So twenty-two cities carry roads. The remaining sixty-three carry what is genuinely open — the weather service’s active alerts where it reaches, and the conditions on the road right now, of which visibility is the one figure that is directly a road reading. Where a city has no speed feed the page prints a dash and says who holds the data, rather than drawing a number nobody measured.
reading the wire…
The desk
The world, and what each city publishes.
The top twelve cities of every continent by the size of their metropolitan area, plus the ones this desk already watched. Point at the map, search it, or use the two selects — they are four doors to the same choice and they stay in step. Every card is live before you press it: the temperature and the visibility there this minute, all of them in a single request. The three marks say which feeds that city publishes — Speeds, Alerts, Conditions — so a city with fewer feeds reads as a different city rather than as a broken page.
The world
reading…
The map
The roads, inked by speed.
One mark per reading, coloured by how fast traffic there is moving — a line for New York, where the feed carries the whole stretch of road, and a dot for Madrid, where it carries a sensor. Both are drawn straight from the coordinates the feed itself gives, over that city’s own published boundary. No tiles, no key, no map company: New York’s ground is its five borough boundaries and the water is the space between them. Hover a mark for its speed and how old the reading is; hover anywhere else for the borough. Twenty more cities draw their roads the same way, off their own transport authorities’ feeds. Where a feed reports a speed it MODELLED rather than measured — which on the Australian networks is most links, most of the time — that link is not drawn at all, and the count of what was withheld is printed beside the reading. The remaining sixty-three cities get the live visibility across the city instead, sampled inside their own boundary.
The map
The roads
Every stretch, one row each.
The whole reporting set, not a top ten: every stretch of road the city is measuring right now, with the speed it is moving at, how long it is taking to cross, and how old that reading is. Sort by any of them. Open a row and the page pulls that stretch’s last twenty-four hours out of the archive and draws it.
The reporting set
The day
One stretch, twenty-four hours.
The hours ahead
What the road will be like.
Twelve hours of the three things that change how a road drives: how far you can see, how hard it is raining, and how hard the wind is pushing. This is the only band on the page that is a forecast rather than a measurement, and it says so.
The air
What the traffic leaves behind.
Particulates and the air-quality index where the roads are. It is the one number on this desk that is a consequence of traffic rather than a description of it — and unlike a congestion score, it is measured.
The statistics
Counted, not modelled.
Each of these is arithmetic over the readings on the map: how many stretches are reporting, how fast they are moving on average, how many are crawling, and how long ago the feed last spoke. There is no congestion index and no predicted delay, because the public data does not carry either and inventing one would make every other number here worth less.
The bulletin
What is happening on the road.
Incidents, closures and construction from the transport department’s own register, and the weather service’s active alerts for the same area, merged newest first with the source stamped on every item. Nothing is ranked and nothing is summarised — it is the wire, in the order it arrived.
The wire
The bulletin is read from public feeds in your browser. With JavaScript off it cannot be drawn.
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