Show Traffic & Road Incidents in Maps App for OS X Mavericks

If you’re planning a drive or some sort of vehicular journey while on your Mac, you can use the Maps app bundled with OS X Mavericks to help avoid annoying traffic, slow downs, road closures, construction work, and accidents by enabling the built-in incident reporter feature. It’s just a click away, but the icon isn’t the most obvious indicator of what the feature provides the user. Launch the Maps app to check it out:

1. From the Maps app, search or zoom into the region you wish to get traffic details for
2. Click the little car icon in the upper left corner of Maps to show traffic and traffic incidents

Vehicle traffic and road congestion is indicated in two ways; dotted orange on the map demonstrates speed reductions and slower travel due to congestion or some incident, and dotted red lines are used to show either stopped traffic or very slow moving traffic.

Unlike showing the live traffic reports in Google Maps from the iOS side, it does not show a green line to indicate free flowing traffic, and instead nothing will be displayed to indicate that specific road or route is in the clear.

4 Maps Incident Report Icons

In addition to the standard traffic information, there are four incident report icons that can display on the map:

• A red crash/accident icon
• A orange road work / construction icon
• A red road closed sign, indicated by a red circle with a dash through it (-)
• Yellow triangle for general traffic alerts and incident reports

If you want to see what these alert icons actually look like on a map but your region is showing up as trouble free, search for a bigger city or a place with a lot of mapping data, like San Francisco, which seems to have perpetual road work and road closures.

This should be particularly helpful for holiday travel when just about everyone seems to hit the road at once, so use the OS X Maps app to plan ahead, avoid the traffic, and enjoy the drive! Don’t forget that you can export PDF’s and print out maps and directions for your travels or other needs too.