In his Wall Street Journal article entitled “On the Road” of February 16, 2009, Roger Cheng describes various options that are available to a traveler to check road traffic conditions using his or her cell phone.

Cheng reviews a number of websites and services providing maps of cities including traffic conditions. In his “Take a Look” section, Cheng suggests to try Beat the Traffic.mobi “to get a better feel for a city than a map can offer”.

He goes on to say: “Beat the Traffic offers real-time video of major intersections and highways gleaned off of feeds from local traffic cameras. You can set up what roads and routes you want to go on ahead of time on your PC, and check the images and traffic updates on your cellphone later. Another feature allows you to calculate how long it will take to get to a certain point, factoring in traffic. Traffic-jam alerts can be sent to your phone. You can access the site on your phone at BeatTheTraffic.mobi.”

“In addition to 75 cities in the U.S., the site covers Toronto.”

One very interesting free download Cheng mentions as well is called “Prompt” and is available from Proxpro.com. Prompt lets you tie appointment locations in your calendar to traffic conditions for an optimal on-time arrival.

The WSJ article can be found here.