Private Street Traffic Application?

tjk

Hello!
In a previous thread, I posted about a method i had found to use google maps offline with downloaded map data. Offline maps is still working for me great, but i have found myself in a bit of a conundrum because i cannot see any traffic data.

There have been a few times now when i have gotten onto the highway with maps giving me an ETA of 30 minutes at rush hour making it take more like 90m or other similar situations. I figured it may use heuristics to predict an eta without an internet connection, as that is a feature google could easily provide since they clearly have such a historical dataset they could use to generate this. But nope, it relys on streaming entirely.

I am looking for an application that could provide me with traffic data. Real time data would obviously be preferred, but even hieuristical data taking into account the time of year, time of day etc would be good for my use.

I am wondering if any privacy nuts here are aware of such a thing that i can run on grapheneos. I was thinking i could possibly run google maps in a work profile, in another profile, or on the web without location permissions but with networking enabled so i can zoom in and see traffic. I have not investigated this yet, i wanted to see if anyone here had any ideas first. Any other app suggestions are welcone as well. I just dont want anyone having my precise location. I am mainly looking for something with highway data.

Thanks!

Dan-cer

tjk At least here in Germany, this is very important - because of countless traffic jams and road closures / detours.
That's why my favorite is Here WeGo. You can download all maps worldwide for free and then either navigate completely offline or have the traffic situation displayed online. The app can also be installed via Aurora.
The beta version is compatible with Android Auto and data is only used for the traffic situation, not for the offline maps.
I have been able to use Here WeGo very successfully in Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Croatia and a few other Balkan countries. It's reliable, the maps are always updated and the app doesn't need to shy away from comparison with Google Maps. It is on a par!

Anais

tjk I've tried them all and for me waze is the smoothest.

Dan-cer

Anais Isn't Waze connected with Google? And how avoid ads there?

Anais

Dan-cer Waze was acquired by Google in 2013, and you have settings so that advertising is not based on your habits.

mmmm

I use magic earth. Its the only one (aside osamd at organic) with a sane privacy policy in my book. But unlike osamd and organic, it offers a more apple maps/google maps/waze type experience. Not open source though doesn't need google to work.

Dan-cer

mmmm Yes, also to me it was quite interesting and I gave magic earth a try. However, first 2 times it was freezing, and with 3rd try it didn't know the place and wanted me to drive in the opposite direction, with way more time than my usual used Here WeGo.
So I dropped it.
Could be that it has some lack in certain regions and works fine in others thou.

zzz

Anais About google:

you have settings so that advertising is not based on your habits.

Unfortunately Google does not have a good history of honoring opt-out privacy settings.

https://apnews.com/article/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/14/tech/google-location-tracking-settlement/index.html

TrustExecutor

You can check this out: https://gripfastistech.com/index.php/blog/95-update-2020-osmand-google-traffic-live.html

If it adheres to your own privacy policy towards Google I don't know. It may be a better solution than using the full Maps application. I don't know if your exact location is transmitted, or only the map data.

tjk

TrustExecutor Wow. Osmand is extremely cool, thank you for sharing this! I plan to try this out going forward. I setup an overlay like the article lies out.

Through testing that API that is listed in the article, you can observe the way it works.
Basically, it is just downloading a region image from google earth with a traffic overlay. So if Google is tracking usage of this API and correlating it with ips or something like that, they really arent getting anything besides your general location within several 10s of miles. You could also decrease the max zoom level in osmand, which would decrease accuracy further. Each level of zoom is 2x i believe, with zoom 0 just being the entire earth. the x and y attributes on the api are just coordinates on the projection.

You can also set the update/expire rate for these images in osmand to be whatever value you want, which is nice. However I am curious if there is a style on this api that shows heiristics data. The article is using style 15 which is live traffic data apparently, but I havent found an api description as of yet to see what the others do. Using heuristical data allows for each image to be updated only every once and a while, vs with live traffic data the refresh rate needs to be set low to actually be useful. Although live data is more useful because you can see accidents etc vs heuristical data over a short period would only be really useful for seeing construction etc (that being said, construction is usually what holds me up).

The only real downside to the approach taken here is that it doesnt seem like osmand is smart enough to show you an eta based on data from these traffic images. I suppose I can test that out myself, but right now it is late where I am and there is little traffic to affect the eta either way.

Overall I think this one is the best suggestion so far for privacy. I havent always had the best luck with OSM based mapping apps but osmand is by far the most powerful one i have seen so it could be better. Either way it can always just be used for traffic data too and then I could plan a general route and continue using my basic nav using my offline gmaps. Really, an app that can show me traffic AND navigate well would be a complete luxury to me haha, so I am not in need of that. One or the other is fine.

Thanks everyone for their suggestions so far!

secrec

TrustExecutor Unfortunately, the traffic overlay on osmand doesn't get taken into account for navigation. It just draws the colored lines over the map.

TrustExecutor

[unknown]
But how can they guarantee this data isn't collected in other ways? It sounds too good to be true actually.

[unknown]
I tried Magic Earth but I found it to be unreliable and buggy. Also here we need to trust the company's word that they do not share or monetize our location data.

I have tried all of those apps and my absolute favourite is OsmAnd. I like more the 2D style navigation and after getting used to the sometimes quite complicated user interface it is really good. Finding addresses are not always inuitive and reliable so in that case where I struggle, I just open Google Maps PWA in Vanadium, search the address there (which is always found), and share the location to OsmAnd, then I get the exact coordinates and can navigate to it.

And if one can compromise to get the real-time traffic overlay map from Google then then this is a pretty solid option, and if the exact location are not transferred to google using the map overlay (I'm not sure exactly how it works), then it is a quite private option too. This of course requires Network permission for OsmAnd.

Arnauld

Hi, I am using Osmand with Tom tom taffic as an overlay. Google it to find how to do it as I don't remember how I did it...

tjk

Arnauld I will look into that. Thanks!

router99

Arnauld Google it

I thought your purpose was to avoid G**gle.

christiee

Sigalert.com for me

Dan-cer

I prefer apps that work well. I use Here WeGo for navigation. Not open source, but not Google either. And tends to be better than Google. Download free offline maps worldwide.