every year at Christmastime we drive from the south to the north where people we love inexplicably want to live even though they have winter there.
Most years there is some kind of winter weather and we have to decide to travel on or stop. I find it very hard to find out what conditions are really like. This time we drove the whole route under a “winter weather advisory” and it was fine. Cold and rainy, but with a modicum of caution perfectly fine for driving.
Where do Dopers who know go to find out what the actual real time road conditions are like?
in the USA the weather bureau
you can pick any location and zoom into a 50 mile range on a map and get weather forecasts for an area of a few miles. you can also navigate from any spot in any direction so following a direction is easy.
each state would have a department of transportation which will give road conditions and construction. you can find states from
http://www.usa.gov/Agencies/State-and-Territories.shtml
government agencies will tend to be conservative in giving hazards. weather hazards are particularly hard; the warning is for a large area (a county or more) and details like a degree or two of temperature is the difference of having a hazard or not, factors like amount of traffic or nearby cities and industries can change weather and hazards on a small scale.
Google Maps - the real time traffic overlay is very useful, even when zoomed out to cover a large (even multi-state) area - you can look right now at how snow is causing a lot of problems in CT, for example.
Have a look at the traffic and weather options on maps.nokia.com. But for weather-related road closures, the state DOT websites are your best bet.
I don’t want to encourage people to spend money; dollars are [del]damn[/del] hard to come by. Yes, the above websites are good. Also, knowing what AM stations which broadcast reliable weather for each metro region you are driving through is a plus.
Most are easy to follow, because if you can’t get the station, you generally are out of that traffic region.
If you have a cellphone, there are a LOT of apps that give you live weather based on where you are, assuming your phone has coverage where you are driving.
Or…
(…and this is where it gets expensive…)
You could upgrade to an XM radio in your car. The channels up around the 130s have live traffic/weather updates by metro region from NYC to LA and from Grand Forks to San Antonio. You can set those stations as presets in a row for your way down
and then follow them back up on your way home. The only draw back is, you’ll need to know your geography well enough to know when to switch from say Falls Church to DC (used just as an example).
Otherwise you might be really upset that Falls Church says all traffic is light and the weather is clear while you’re cursing your way through rain and Beltway traffic.