I’ve used Sigalert to keep track of highway traffic for years - glance at it when I leave my desk to go run errands, call it up frequently on my phone to choose best routes home, etc. It’s always seemed pretty timely and reliable, the more so as the highway monitoring system gets more and more thorough. (Did YOU know you can call up a camera view of almost any urban highway stretch?)
But in the last week or so it’s failed me absymally. Coming home Friday night in Western Connecticut, I could have gone small roads to join our homeward interstate, but the big highways showed green, so I went that way. And found myself in a five-mile, one-hour backup due to construction that should have been red on Sigalert. (Green as grass.)
Today I was coming home from big-town shopping and could again have taken smaller roads, but stayed on the highway… to run into a huge two-mile slowdown. It had gone on so long that they were diverting people into the express lane (which you’re not allowed to cross into except at transfer points), and when I got to the accident, the vehicles were loaded on trucks and the emergency vehicles were packing up. No flag; green as Irish eyes.
The Mrs is running an errand up through Massholechoosetts and both she and the family member coming down from Maine got snarled in horrible traffic. All green on Sigalert.
Is the system down, overloaded, bought by evil overseas powers or just crappy now unless you’re a paid subscriber?