Beijing is home to approximately 17 million people and just recently, Beijing’s vehicle population has exploded to 4 million units. It is fairly easy to navigate around Beijing as you can visualise the city as a dart board; with Tiananmen Square being the bull’s eye. With Google maps, you can now view real time traffic conditions in Beijing. Not that it really matters as the roads are pretty congested throughout the day and even worse on weekends. At present, depending on the last digit on a vehicle’s plate number, cars are not allowed to be driven within the 5th ring road for at least one day during weekdays.

Now let’s get back to the live traffic monitoring system on Google maps. On Tuesday, Dec 29 at around 3.50pm Beijing time, the traffic situation in the North-east side of Beijing seems to be smooth. The one shown in red is the 3rd ring road which gets congested pretty much the whole day.

On the top right corner of your screen you can actually view the explanation of the diffrent colours – although the colour schemes are self explanatory.

You can also view it using satellite view:

It is pretty impressive on how Google is able to bring this technology to our desktops. What’s next Google?