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Thinking out loud: In an attempt to vastly improve the data, could a mobile app be written that can "detect" if you are driving (exact location, speed, alignment/frequency to your past paths, etc), in such a way that the data could be automatically collected and crowdsourced?

Fire up the app, let it run in background, and it logs everything passively and adds it to global data set. Feasible?

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Forgive me if I've heard wrong or if this is just wishful thinking, but doesn't Google do this with Navigation? I believe there's an option to view a traffic layer and from what I've seen in my commutes, it's fairly accurate for gauging traffic density. It should also be capable of calculate travel time based upon crowdsourced traffic information from Android users.

They do yeah. On Android there's even a widget that you set with your destination and it'll tell you the journey time. Would be great to see their live traffic data used for this journey time metric across the world. I'm moving interstate here in Australia, would certainly help narrow down choosing suburbs.

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