One of the minuses of urban life is traffic. It can be hellish, even though the locally-absurd gas prices have reduced traffic a bit. In particular, I am of the opinion that few things are ruder, stupider and more dangerous than a sports fan on their way to a game. Except maybe that same fan returning home after a few beers and a big loss. Locally, any time there’s a Padres game downtown, the traffic backs up highways 163, 805 and 5 for miles. The Chargers aren’t quite as bad, since Qualcomm Stadium is east a bit, but still a problem, as are things like Fleet Week.
For whatever reason, web-based traffic feeds don’t have any concept of ‘monstrous event with traffic implications,’ though I really wish they’d get a clue. Maybe add a sidebar?
Initially, I had the idea to simply subscribe to their respective iCalendar feeds, and be warned that way, but that’s pretty noisy; all you really care about are home games, but there aren’t separate calendars for that.
Recently I found a solution that seems to work quite well called FuseCal. It can read all sorts of feeds, including graphical calendars (impressive, that) and allows you to filter them via strings. So I have three feeds right now merging into a tag of ‘traffic factors’
Padres + “at San Diego”
Chargers + “Qualcomm Stadium”
Fleet Week (all)
If you have any suggestions as to other events to add, leave a comment, also if you want I can make the feed public. So far I’m pretty happy - this is a free service, it works very well and the merge of feeds produces information that’s hard to get otherwise. Very cool.