You don’t have to rely on traffic reports on the radio to tell if your route to and from work is going to be chock-full of delays. TomTom has a free “live traffic” service that overlays a map of your current location with road conditions: it shows you where the delays are, what the reason for the delay is and the length of the queue of cars so you can plan your commute accordingly.

To access this very useful info, simply visit the TomTom website and click the Live Traffic button at the top. That opens this view, centred on your current location as determined by your computer’s IP address or your phone/tablet’s GPS unit:

There are other ways, too, but they’re not as useful as TomTom’s all-in-one overview. South Africa has a network of traffic cameras that take pictures that are then fed to the internet, where they are collated and presented in a grid pattern for motorists to look at. You can find that feed here.

It’s not very user-friendly as each camera’s exact location isn’t displayed, and it will take familiarity with the areas being watched to realise what you’re looking at, but it’s at least there. The images that you’ll see are very recent, having been taken seconds before you loaded the page.

Do you know of any other high-tech ways of planning a road trip? Let us know in the comments.