TrafficJammr

TrafficJammr is an amalgamation of free data from various sources around the internet, the traffic data itself comes from the BBC’s TPEG xml feed and the maps are displayed using Google’s Mapping API and finally the site also uses a database of postcode coordinates to let you center the map on your home or office … or at least that’s the idea.

While the BBC & Google provide full and unfettered access to their data and services, the Post Office only offers a small section of their postcode data, unless you’re prepared to fork out for the full dataset. For free, they offer the coordinates for the center of what is called the outcode, the first part of your postcode (BB2 or LS1).

This really causes a problem for places like my home town, Blackburn, where the outcode BB1 is for the town center and BB2 is for the area outside that, so the center of both postcodes is actually pretty similar. This offers very poor resolution. When you consider that two completely separate towns can have the same outcode things are even worse.

Other than the fact the Post Office has historically charged an extortionate amount for this data, there really is no reason why this data cannot be free to use. I’d like to see the Post Office provide an API that people can access to get the longitude & latitude of a postcode, along with a license that enables them to cache that data for use in their own non-commercial application, and charge a fee to the companies that want to use the information for commercial gain.