Leveling up the traffic alerts system

Road.lk's traffic alert system now get's a fair bit of use, and proved it's worth whenever the congestion level in Colombo went through the roof. For example when that infamous traffic survey was conducted by the police, road.lk started reporting higher levels of traffic by 6:39am and over the next three hours published an additional 56 alerts. Another example was on February 6th when the main stream media started talking about massive traffic jams near Lake House. Their alerts started at around 4:30 pm but road.lk already published it's first alert for that area at 3:17. I feel it's a decent effort, but all this is level 1.

Thing would have been even better if road.lk had reached level 2. Then both the above incidences would have been reported at least 5 minutes earlier, and quite possibly a comparison would have been provided which would enable motorist to estimate how much longer they would spend on the road if they chose to brave the traffic.

In order to reach Level 2, road.lk needs more people to use their GPS tracker, which is a feature of the Android app available for download. Though quite a few people have downloaded the app, the majority seems to only use it for traffic alerts. But for better traffic alerts, the GPS tracker usage is needed.

The tracker would enable road.lk to automatically detect high congestion levels and automatically send out notifications so that the alerts can be sent out a little bit quicker and save you that extra bit of time spent on the road.