An idea for easing the traffic condition

Coming to work yesterday I had a flash, a brainwave. Much of our problems with traffic is due to the lack of information of whats happening ahead. Its specially true when one has options to make alternative route decisions. What I want is something like a friend in front of the traffic constantly telling me about the status of the traffic. So this is the idea.

We are increasingly having GPS systems installed in our mobiles & cars etc. There should be a system wherein information keeps being sent in from the traffic and fed into my GPS route map telling me the traffic condition on the route ahead. Traffic information from every road in the city might be picked up by special units set in taxis. These would relay information relating to location and traffic speed on a real time basis. My assumption is that at any point of time, there would be at least enough taxis stuck up in traffic to give me an accurate enough picture of the traffic conditions. The system can be jigged up to broadcast data only when a passenger sits in thus ensuring that we don’t see a taxi parking lot as traffic jam. The error in the readings due to taxis going slowly or not moving on traffic free roads will be quite minimal. Secondly data points will increase in peak traffic giving more information in the time period we require it most in.

The cost of installing the location transmitter and aggregating the information by the taxi firm can be offset by a paid subscription service that Im sure people will be more than will to pay for. Augmenting this might be advertising revenue that could be generated by ads from companies located on the routes the subscriber is looking to move on.

From what I know, google is already working on a system of this sort however, the key driver needs to be the owner of the vehicles that generate the traffic broadcast

Anybody to try it out?