Do you really need someone on TV to tell you about traffic?  Why, no you don’t now that the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) has made their traffic alerts available by RSS feed. I’ve just now put myself into direct competition with local traffic reporter Jennie Stencil by adding the Forsyth County traffic alerts to my blog; just look in the right hand column at the bottom and you’ll find it right there.

Of course you can set up your very own traffic alert system so that you don’t have to wait on anyone.  Here’s one way to get traffic alerts sent via text to your phone:

• Go to the NCDOT’s Traveler Information Management System page(http://apps.dot.state.nc.us/tims/)
• Select the region or county that you’re interested in getting traffic updates on.
• Once you’ve gotten to that page go to the bottom and look for the "RSS" button.
• Click on that and you’ll go to the page that acts as a kind of permanent news ticker for that particular travel area.
• Highlight the address in your address bar.  An example would be this address for the Piedmont Triad region: http://apps.dot.state.nc.us/TIMS/RSS/IncidentList.aspx?RegionId=2
• Go to www.web-alerts.com
• Paste the address you just copied into the field provided and click "Go".
• Add your phone number in the appropriate field, add keywords (if you want to) in the keyword field and click "Create Alert".
• When you get the text asking for confirmation just confirm and you’ll have your very own traffic alert system.

One problem that I’ve found with this is that the alert contains a link to a web page, which is okay for me because I have a Blackberry and an unlimited data plan with Verizon.  For someone who is on the road and getting the text via regular phone this is going to be a problem.  Stay tuned because I’m looking for a way to send a straight text alert.

What’s cool is that NCDOT allows you to select traffic alerts by region, county or route so you don’t have to get alerts for Raleigh if you live in Winston-Salem.