To clarify: Are you talking about a full service, i.e. with announcers delivering bulletins over ISDN or equivalent technology, a la Trafficlink? Or just the basic information delivered through a website?

With the advent of accurate travel information on mobile phones (whether you’re talking about Waze or Google Navigation), is there really any future for traffic and travel on the radio at all? What on earth is the point?

Is traffic and travel actually a service that should only be incorporated into news bulletins where there’s something genuinely big (closure of the M62) and otherwise simply not bothered with? For 99% of listeners, it’s an irrelevance, surely – either I’m not travelling at that time, or it doesn’t actually cover my journey anyway.

<cynic>Radio stations don’t do traffic and travel because they want to provide a service to their listeners. They do it so that they have another on-air element which can be sponsored.</cynic>.

I think you’d be surprised, the immediacy of radio – plus the fact that in-car users can’t sit and fiddle with their mobile phones when they’re driving means there’s still a demand. Not to mention the fact that a large percentage of drivers don’t have IP enabled devices with them in car (that said I use the TMC on my sat nav for travel information a lot these days)

I had a small involvement in the HA/TrafficRadio Community Radio Service that Ian is referring to, and there was certainly a demand for this service amongst community operators who saw travel news as enhancing the service they provided to their communities.

I note with the relaunch of digital radio in Germany on Monday http://www.swr.de/contra/-/id=7612/nid=7612/did=8386472/b2v8q9/index.html that relevant traffic info is mentioned as one of the features. I still welcome traffic news on the radio, especially major accidents. But I would like it as a button for on-demand audio. Grundig used to have a radio with this feature, storing what was said between ARI signals.

You could add the same argument for weather, financial and perhaps even sport! (dump all that onto mobile web pages) however as a listener these elements do add dimension and value to programming.

I would of course note that both Waze and Google represent the very poor end (as far as quality goes) for traffic information today. But the main point is well taken and something I’d like to address. Traffic information of the type delivered to smartphones is important for two reasons: it is easily digestible by the navigation software itself (dynamic rerouting etc) whilst at the same time is a good semantic representation of the status of the road network that a person can understand. However, traffic information delivered by a human being delivers a degree of context and intimacy that software algorithms cannot deliver. Software will tell you there is “severe congestion on the A56 northbound with queues of 3 km. Travel-time through the problem area will be 10 mins which is 8 mins longer than usual”. A person will tell you “There’s congestion on the Bury New Road just past the Texaco garage all the way up to Tescos. The police reckon they will clear the problem in about 20 mins but we’ll keep you updated”. Finally, I would draw your attention to comments well made by both yourself and the Right Honourable Nicholas Piggott on the subject of scability of broadcast versus connected networks ;-)

I think that until someone comes up with a viable hands-free alternative which gives the local detail that David Levine mentioned in his post, traffic and travel information will have a place on the radio. It’s such an effective way for a station to reach its audience. In fact, it is the only way in which a station can directly assist their listener in their day to day life in many cases. The UK has an almost unique problem with traffic as it has such a dense population and high ratio of car owners within that population, and yet traffic radio is a given equal or greater focus elsewhere. For example in France (Autoroute 107.7) and Italy (Isoradio gets close to a million listeners per day). It’s a great tool to connect with your listener, and I don’t think it’s going anywhere just yet, despite the loss of Traffic Radio from the HA (which is very good, in my humble opinion).

David: I don’t disagree that humans can speak irrelevant information in a more succinct and interesting way than computer algorithms. But traffic and travel in London – or on national networks – is almost completely a waste of time in my experience. Mostly, it’s information about the wrong place, broadcast at the wrong time.

I think I’m asking whether it does, actually, “assist their listener in their day to day life”, since I don’t believe traffic news on the radio is ever useful excepting major road closures and snow.

Seems to me it’s mostly broadcast because, as David Jones says, it’s a sponsorable thing. All I know is that it’s 95% irrelevant information, at an irrelevant time, talking about irrelevant places, and it gets in the way.

It is something that you listen out for, it’s probably not useful if nothing’s happening but as soon as something does happen it’s an utterly fabulous service. I don’t think you need to go as far as some people do reading out train times.

Of note: http://rockingvicar.webeden.co.uk/#/beep-beep/4544589037 – the rocking vicar wants traffic services off the radio too.

Realizing that the U.S. experience is going to be different, but for me radio traffic news is a daily help. Google Maps can show me that the road is red for a ways, but the radio is better at letting me know (without taking my eyes off the road to fiddle with the phone) whether it’s an accident or construction that’s causing the delay and how far the backup stretches. Around Washington, I always listen more closely to traffic news in the car to try to determine if I can take my usual route or if I need to find a different bridge. And when driving up to New England, as soon as I can start catching WCBS’s signal I do to see which bridge or tunnel is going to get me through/across New York with the least amount of trouble. The idea of on-demand traffic info Jonathan mentions would be better than having to wait for “traffic on the 8s”, but those radio reports serve a useful purpose.

Where’s Mr Jackson when you need him ;-) I’ve been out of T&T for a couple of years now, so maybe it’s changed, but the number of jamline calls I used to field suggests to me that to some it’s essential. Now if you spend the majority of your life on tubes in that there London, tooled to the eyeballs with iPhones and accessories, perhaps it’s less relevent to you? The Beeb continues with it on both a local and national level without the sponsorship opportunity, so perhaps that’s not all that’s in it?

I can’t check my phone as I drive. The traffic & travel on my BBC Local station in the morning is extremely useful for my morning commute. On a longer drive, BBC R2’s bulletins are also helpful.

<Lurks> Probably best for me to keep out of this one right now! However, I can point to Ofcom research (albeit from 2007) that found that 69% of respondents said local traffic and travel was important in deciding whether or not to tune into a radio station. And it’s important to bear in mind that each station (or even members of staff within a station!) will place a different emphasis on the importance of information content, presentation style and revenue. Meanwhile, the only thing that’s important to the listener is the best way of getting out of that jam they’re in at that particular moment. Is that YOUR station because you OWN traffic in your market, or their mobile or sat nav?

Ahhh the numbers. You can always rely on Mr J for the numbers ;-)

I should add though : I have T&T cutting in via RDS’s TA (using EON in the case of the local radio) so it doesn’t draw me to the station itself, and yes I do often immediately hit the button to turn it off if I’m already most of the way home/nearly at work. So it’s not necessarily an all-round ratings winner…

Hi Anthony, by the way, It all depends on the size of the TSA and the length of the report… if you’re doing a regional station in 25 seconds, it’s probably not going to “assist the listener” very much, but if you’re doing a decent report for a specific area then it will do. I think we’ve moved to the point where the listeners would notice if it wasn’t there, rather than specifically tune in for it, but if you can mix traffic with personality then you’ll get an audience and a following.

Are there any figures on the ratio of audience driving towards traffic blackspots vs total audience of a station? I’m guessing less than .1%, – leaving 99.9% of the audience putting up with irrelevant announcements for minutes at a time. Modern sat nav systems include live updates with cars re-routing according to traffic conditions, I’d prefer my navigation tech navigating and my radio tech playing music. I think we are going to have a wait a few years before that type of tech becomes the norm though and radio stations ditch that type of content – meanwhile I’ll stick to my music collection.

Further thoughts from me at: http://www.trafficpaul.blogspot.com/.

Hi Ian,

You may want to DM me, we’re working on somethig similar at the minute & would be good to see if there are economies of scale to be had…

N

I agree that scheduled bulletins probably are a bit pointless, but it can be a good trigger when there is a significant travel event.

Listening to a radio station while travelling the other day, the presenter mentioned that there had been an accident ahead of me on my route, so I got out my phone and was able to watch the green line ahead of me gradually turning red, and find an alternate route.

Now this is a journey I’ve made hundreds of times in the past, so there was no need for me to have had sat nav or Google Maps to reference where I was going. Without the announcement on the radio I’d have never checked how bad the traffic was ahead, and subsequently would have been sat in stationary traffic for a couple of hours.

I remember a car radio – I think it might well have been my Mum’s old Ford Galaxy, actually – that would record travel news bulletins (in very low quality) using the TA flag and you could play them back.