Consumer Reports...reports:
Traffic information for drivers on the go has come a long way since the days when it was limited to Bob in Chopper Nine, flying around the metropolitan area and reporting on whatever bridge or highway was beneath him.
Bob is still up there, at least in some media markets, but now he’s only part of the picture. Today, traffic info comes from a variety of sources, sometimes even including the cars stuck in traffic themselves. The alerts you see on the GPS system in your car are likely coming from some combination of these sources, gathered up and redistributed by one of a very few companies that act as aggregators, compiling, cross-referencing, and verifying the information before shipping it back out. (Read our GPS buying advice and ratings.)
Kirkland, Washington-based Inrix is one such aggregator, and it lays claim to being the largest provider of traffic data in the world, even if it is a name unknown to most commuters. Inrix monitors real-time traffic flow on some 260,000 miles of roads in the United States, and it provides that information to a number of automakers, portable GPS device makers, and telecommunications companies, including AT&T, BMW, Ford, Garmin, Mercedes-Benz, TomTom, Navigon, and Sprint. Inrix employs about 60 people, most of whom are involved in the dark science of creating algorithms and analytics to make sense of all the data they gather...
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