Many Lagosians have been complaining for some time now about the deplorable traffic situation on the roads.
But a solution may have come in the way of Google Maps.
This is because the Google Map service in Nigeria has added a feature which displays traffic information on the go, real time.
How good or bad the traffic situation in an area is can be determined by three colours: green, orange and red.
Green is used to represent a free road, orange a low-moving traffic and red a “bumper-to-bumper” situation.
According to tech blog Techcabal, google gathers the traffic information through the GPS locations on mobile phones of people currently on a particular road.
This is analysed taking cognisance of the speed at which the vehicles conveying the people are moving along the length of the road. It is from this that the live traffic map is generated.
But the problem with this map is that reliability is affected when mobile phone locations of people plying the road at a particular time are not turned on or the data service on their mobile devices is turned off.
In this case, the overlay will appear as a green, the same way a good traffic situation will appear.