Patent ID: 6911918

Claim:
A method of operating an electronic vehicular traffic flow display system using mobile receiving stations in vehicles in cooperation with the methods of the existing Global Positioning System, said method comprising the steps of: monitoring the speed of traffic, over a given period of time, in a given direction, on serial sub-sections of given roads in a given geographic area; calculating the average speed of said traffic; creating signals representing the average monitored traffic speed for specific portions of said given roads, and associating identifying signals for each said specific road portion associated with each said average traffic speed signal; transmitting said traffic speed signals, and said specific road portion identification signals to a mobile vehicular receiving station; determining the average speed of each of said traffic speed signals; assigning a different color code to each one of a plurality of pre-determined average speed ranges; providing each mobile station with pre-defined, stored road map signals representing road maps of geographic areas; providing signals from said section stations to said mobile stations identifying the appropriate map to display for the geographic area of said section station; selecting and displaying said appropriate one of said road maps at said mobile vehicular receiving station; applying said color codes to said displayed road map to show said specific road portions in colors corresponding to said average speed for each said specific road portion, making destination data signals available to one of said mobile receiving stations to identify a specific destination location; identifying the then-current location of said mobile receiving station by accessing signals from said GPS; accessing said GPS to identify a preferred GPS route from said then-current location to said specific desired location; and displaying said preferred route in highlighted fashion in accordance with existing display algorithms of said GPS; accessing data in said system data to determine if a first GPS preferred route between the known location of a mobile receiving station and a selected destination location has been identified; periodically determining if the current average speed for any given portion of said first GPS preferred route is less than a predetermined minimum value; in response to identification of any such given route portion, accessing the GPS standard travel time value routinely assigned to said such given route portion by said GPS and temporarily resetting said travel time value to a given maximum value such that said given route portion does not meet the requirements for inclusion by said GPS in a GPS preferred route.