Google Navigation Adds Traffic Data into Routing Decisions

"Ever been stuck in traffic, only to find out you’d have been better off going a bit out of your way to take a less congested route? If you’re like me, you probably hear the traffic report telling you what you already know: traffic is bad on the road you’re currently on, and you should have taken another. It doesn’t need to be this way, and we want to help. So we’re happy to announce that Google Maps Navigation (Beta) will now automatically route you around traffic. With more than 35 million miles driven by Navigation users every day, this should add up to quite a bit of time saved!"

Well, here's one of those things that makes you go "Hmm.... why didn't they do that before?!?". The traffic data plus routing could give Google's free product a real advantage over services that require payment for this sort of thing. Of course if you're in the middle of nowhere, you probably won't get the traffic data. Of course you probably don't have a data connection... or traffic in the first place!