I've had several traffic-enabled devices in my car for over a year now, and still routinely end up driving right smack into a traffic jam. Checking the GPS only adds insult to injury, as the device displays "no traffic events".

It's estimated that real-time traffic information will reach more than 83 million subscribers by 2012 (according to ABI Research). Numbers like that are encouraging, but in order to make traffic information truly valuable to drivers, three elements will be required:

1. Better traffic data collection - simply put, the coverage is poor today. More traffic data needs to be collected and the overall canvas needs to be bigger. Road sensors, cameras, radars, loop sensors, etc. need to be deployed on a much larger scale before we reach critical mass of useful data.
2. Shift focus from accident alerts - focus needs to shift from alerting drivers to accidents and other incident data to predictive and intelligent traffic flow information, delivering data about more complex problems (for example, highway 287 is usually slow moving at 5:30pm, or, today is a holiday and there wil be increased traffic on highway xyz).
3. Improved usability - virtually all GPS manufacturers offer some form of real-time traffic information today. But most users don't know how to make use of the data because the interface is complex and non-intuitive. GPS companies need to make traffic information easier to interpret and make use of.

There can be little doubt that consumers want real-time traffic information, as evidenced by the rapid growth of companies like INRIX and NAVTEQ/Traffic.com. We're likely still a few years away from traffic data being truly useful, but the technology gap is closing fast, and it won't be long before traffic data is an essential GPS feature you can't live without.