Traffic Solutions in a Mouse Click With Web Program

It’s 3 o’clock Monday afternoon. A 4:30 p.m. meeting is two freeways and four towns away. Instead of relying on radio traffic updates, Orange County and Los Angeles drivers can now learn about problem spots before they leave their PCs.

The Traffic Station, a new channel on the latest version of Microsoft’s Web browser, lets computer users create customized traffic reports. Launched in Orange and Los Angeles counties last week, the program tracks problems on freeways from San Clemente to the San Fernando Valley, and sends updates to a user’s desktop every five minutes.

The service takes its data from 1,200 Caltrans freeway motion devices, said Rachel Sandman, director of Internet technologies for Traffic Station-developer Maxwell Technologies Inc. in San Diego. When cars pile up, the sensors detect the change in the flow of traffic.

“If there’s traffic here in San Diego, you’re likely going to be stuck,” said Sandman, whose firm developed the program with Santa Monica multimedia firm Diablo Production Studio LLC and Alpha Base Interactive in Los Angeles. “But in the L.A. region, there are so many possible alternative routes. A shortcut can save a ton of time.”

Users can punch in their normal routes and the hours they usually spend on the road. The program then monitors these parameters and sends a steady ticker of news across the bottom of the computer screen.

Though Traffic Station is free on PCs, Maxwell this fall plans to offer the same service, for a fee, by telephone to customers without computers. A computer would call subscribers throughout the day and deliver traffic tips.

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P.J. Huffstutter covers high technology for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com.