Posts Tagged traffic

Up until recently, the main driver license and car registration body in Victoria, Vicroads, had a fantastic web-based tool you could use on your mobile phone, which showed the traffic conditions of Melbourne’s major freeways. It was a simple, small tool that comprised of a graphical map showing the freeways in green if traffic was light, which went to red if traffic was heavy.

It was so simple, it worked on most 3G mobile phones that had a web browser. Most of my family and friends came to rely on it. You head out and you check how heavy the traffic is.

However it seems Vicroads, perhaps impressed by the high traffic their baby was receiving, decided to give it an upgrade. A major upgrade. An upgrade so severe, that the only place the “application” now runs is on a desktop computer. I’m taking frames in frames in iframes with enough Javascript to start Web 3.0. It goes without saying that their great little tool is no longer usable on a mobile phone.

In total, the application comprises of 9 html files, 17 Javascript files, 47 images and 2 CSS files, for a whopping total of 587Kb loaded in one hit.

Don’t get me wrong, on the desktop this is a great application, but I can only assume that the managers at Vicroads who are responsible for this didn’t for one moment even consider who their users were, or what their application was being used for.

Do you?