TrafficTV for BlackBerry

This is an application which shows areas of congestion in the UK complete with access to traffic cameras from Transport for London and the Highways Agency.

Downloading the application was simple enough, OTA which is always the easiest way of doing these things.

Once the application is loaded you'll be shown a map of London where you can zoom in and out easily. Areas of congestion and speed restrictions are shown with flashing orange and yellow icons.



Once you have selected a specific area on the map you can click the trackwheel and select 'CCTV':



TrafficTV will then go away and present you with a list of the available cameras in your chosen area which you can scroll through and select:



You'll then be presented with a CCTV or traffic camera image from your chosen location:



So it's certainly an easy application to use, and as you can see the images are of a good solid quality. Images from cameras are also up to date, and in testing the camera images never displayed an image that was more than a couple of minutes old. TrafficTV also seems stable and during testing didn't crash a single time. There is the odd camera that was 'out of order' but that's hardly the fault of the software and no doubt camera maintenance by TFL.

It does list cameras in other parts of the country but I found when selecting any camera outside of London I was presented with 'Camera not available' on every ocassion. I'm assuming it's simply a case of not being wide spread enough just yet, and to be honest this app only has a real use in inner cities in my mind.

In terms of running costs you can pay for TrafficTV in one of two ways. You can pay for a quartly subscription at £14.99 or an annual subscription at £39.99 although I believe the software itself is free. If I travelled in to London daily I would certainly consider this as a cheaper alternative to the various SMS services available and a more instant service than waiting for radio traffic reports, so I would certainly rate it.

In terms of improvements I would like to see it more widespread on other parts of the country however, but no doubt that's coming. It would also be nice if the images refreshed once you had them open but this does not happen (probably wise so it doesn't consume too much data).

More info here:

Traffic TV - Traffic Reports, UK Traffic Information. Traffic TV powered by Trafficmaster

Love to have one of these for the US

I live in the Atlanta area and I use the Georgia Navigator wap web site to view traffic cams, get accident and congestion updates and construction areas. Works very nice for me.

We already have something similar to that but without cameras. Google Maps for the mobile phone.