Buckeye Traffic

Anyone that has ever driven in Ohio in the winter knows that the roads are not always um.... great. For several years I have been visiting a site maintained by ODOT (www.buckeyetraffic.org) that shows the ice/snow condition of major roads throughout the state. Previously the user interface of this site has been less than perfect. In fact, it had one behavior that annoyed me to no end, it would expand the browser window to full screen size upon entering the site, the user had no warning or option. Even with the bad user interface though I used the site often since the data was quite helpful.

This weekend we had the first real nasty storm of the season so I surfed on over to the same old site and apparently it's been rebuilt, quite nicely in fact. They have built the application using ASP.NET using Windows Live Maps as a platform. I can't swear to it but I think they are also using ASP.NET AJAX, I think I recognize a few pieces of the AJAX Control Toolkit even.

There are a couple of pieces that are not perfect:

• Load times are quite long sometimes, apparently the State can afford a good site but not bandwidth


• When a user scrolls the map the data does not reload

Now, I don't want it to sound like those problems take away from the app because they are only minor issues. Overall the it is a huge step forward and a great example of using Live Maps as a platform and a practical use of AJAX.

One question I have though: Who built it?