traffic forecast

We have seven day weather forecasts, why not traffic forecasts too? Accidents are hardly the only thing causing traffic. There are really obvious things that can be known sometimes years in advance: special events, planned closures and weather. There is also historical traffic information to take into account (eg. There is a particularly heavy day before and after Christmas because all government jobs have the same vacation begin and end days.) If there is a freeway that is used by suburban dwellers to get to a popular lake, and a warm day is coming up, the traffic forecast will take this into account. Also, most freeways have different peak times for their opposite directions. Most freeways are not jammed at the same time in both directions, but if you are new to the route, you can't be sure which way is heavy in the morning/afternoon. These are all things you can find out about far, far in advance if you went to about 100 different websites, and spent hours taking all the info into consideration.

Here's how it would be automated. A script scours relevant web pages for events and times they occur and parses the info, reading the numerical data for locations and times of the event into variables which are then used by functions which differ from freeway to freeway. The rest becomes trivial.

An epistemic community consisting of myself, and some trusted individuals around the US and elsewhere could oversee the service, and add those big things that might not be listed anywhere predictable (eg. president arriving at the airport, and shutting down the freeway that gets him to the convention center).

Volunteers could also amend the info, but only after thousands of people say the same thing will it become true, and be taken into account by the program.

You could also just hire cheap labor in another country to do it. Infact, this could be a great way to get around captcha if you are a spammer...oops, someone mark this for deletion.