The problem with live traffic awareness is, that it needs a lot of data to be collected all the time, something only Google or Apple with their monopolistic and privacy invasive ppwer can do. How it works (simplified) is that Google can detect if a lot of phones are on the same street and therefore assumes traffic. This data is, however, proprietary to Google. A FOSS App has the following problems:

Too small of a userbase, to reliably track something
Privacy conscious userbase, not wanting to be tracked
If it had auch a feature, it would be opt-in, as FOSS does (usually) not try to be as evil as Google&Co.
Usually limited server capacity to calculate if an aggregation is traffic

Solutions would be:

Google is forced to make the data publicly available per API as part of some anti-monopolistic ruling
A thrid party (e.g. cities) have their own monitoring of traffic and give public access to it.

So sadly similar dunctionality will not come in the near future in any FOSS app.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Waze was able to do it (before Google bought them).

[–] w2tpmf@lemmy.world 18 points 3 months ago

Waze still does it.

The data pulled in by Waze is independent from the data pulled in by Google Maps.

Waze doesn't use Google's traffic data, but Google does read data out of Waze's.

Yet somehow Waze still has more accurate real time traffic info in the app.

[–] Debs@lemmy.zip 5 points 3 months ago

I'd be willing to share anonymized data as part of a collective traffic data alternative to Google. I imagine there would still be data fees associated with this data collection. We just really need to get an open source alternative to gmaps going. Gmaps is only getting worse. Like, what if something like Street Complete was also able to collect traffic data and feed it into a sharable database?

Alternatively, I wonder if they could buy traffic data from a third party like Garmin or something. I'd be willing to pay a small monthly fee to get away from Google.