Lately my section of the Midwest has been bombarded with one of the worst things a winter season can deal out: freezing rain. From those of you in warmer climes who have not experienced the joys of this fun-fest, it's basically when it starts to rain in warmer air up in the atmosphere. As the rain falls into colder air below (around the 0° C mark), it hits solid objects like trees, power lines, streets and immediately turns to ice.
The end result of this is a glaze of extremely dangerous ice that can turn roads into skating rinks in a matter of minutes and with enough time can pull down the trees and the power lines with ridiculous ease.
So far, I have been lucky and haven't experienced any power outages, unlike my neighbors to the south and my friends in the Northeast, who know very well what I am describing. For me, ice is the worst part of winter--I would rather have a blizzard swing through, because at least with a blizzard you know where you stand. Ice is sneaky, and can cause a lot more damage faster.
Last week, while trying to leave town for a family vacation, my town found itself in the grip of a nasty ice storm (again). It was the worst time of day, early morning before the local news outlets could figure out how to report it. Coupled with this was the fact that by the time the major highway out of town closed due to ice, the morning news shows were over and everyone was blithely going on with their talk shows and infomericals.
I was able (after some difficulty) to get through to the state police post and find out from an exasperated trooper what was going on. By 10:30, the highway was treated and open again. The city streets were still a disaster, but the entrance to the highway isn't too far away... so off we went.
It was a good thing too, because according to people back in town after we left, the mayor declared an emergency and shut down travel on the streets--a fact that wasn't reported widely until the noon news shows.
While this may be seen as a diatribe against local journalism, living in the Great Lakes region, or just plain griping, the point of this blog entry is mostly to reflect on what might happen next, if I can figure out how to do it. What is needed, in this era of Internet-connected cellphones and wi-fi laptops, is a web application that pulls together certain sets of data: announcements from municipal street departments, personal weather stations, and local news station web sites, that can tell Internet and mobile users at a glance: here is the kind of elements you will have to brave if you go out today.
The problem, like a lot of things on the Internet, is that much of this information is out there now, but not all in one place. If I go to Weather Underground, I can get very localized weather information from a guy's weather station who lives five blocks from me. If I check my local news web sites, I can get fairly up-to-date information on school, business, and church closings (which is actually very helpful--if there are a lot of closings in one part of the county versus the another, that's a big clue to Not Drive There).
There are gaps, too: the municipal information is trickier, because like a lot of small cities, there isn't a lot of funding to track where the snow plows and salt trucks have been. Nor does the police department have the time to track where accidents have been/are occuring.
Obviously, in a larger city, Google or Yahoo! Traffic takes care of a lot of this, but for the rest of us living in slightly less urban situations, it's much less likely that there will be coverage. And even then, road conditions aren't reported in much detail. My former home of Indianapolis has good traffic reporting for the interstate highways, but not the local streets.
If I had the time, it would be possible to manually search the information that is there and produce something on a map that could be shared with others in my community. But I have this thing called a job, so you see the problem. It occurs to me in this age of searchable web pages, RSS feeds, and mapping APIs, it should not be too difficult to mine certain sites for information and start mapping road conditions automatically. Allowing users to add geo-based updates from their phones or PCs will greatly enhance such a system.
So, perhaps, at long last, I have found the itch to scratch: the need that will drive me to create my first application after all these years of writing about it.
Needless to say, suggestions more than welcome.
