There's an app to avoid that traffic jam

South Minneapolis resident Vincent Hopwood really appreciates how Google Maps has been helping him deal with the reconstruction of Interstate 35W, a major north-south artery. His phone shows him where traffic is slow and where it's free-flowing.

"Google Maps these days lights up like a Christmas tree, mostly red and green, especially on the weekend when they've been closing 35W between 694 and the crosstown," he said.

Of course, red means slow and green means flow. And Hopwood said that makes it easier to avoid traffic snarls. He relies on the app to give him efficient directions.

"It's helped a lot. Everybody who would normally be taking those main arteries is driving around trying to figure out how to get north to south through the Twin Cities," Hopwood said.

Google's other product, Waze, was developed to calculate routes around traffic snarls.

Users can also add notifications about speed traps, cars pulled over and obstacles on the road.

These apps are hugely popular. Waze has had more than 100 million downloads from the Google app store. Google Maps: more than 1 billion.

John Doan uses Google Maps to tell him how to navigate his commute between downtown Minneapolis and Shoreview. And on longer rides.

"We've found that it's amazingly accurate," Doan said. "We joke with our kids that on these road trips that because we have navigation on our phones, that the art of map reading has been since lost."

Doan is on to something. Back in the early 90s, the state of Minnesota was printing about 1 million tourist maps every two years. But now the count has dropped 40 percent.

Navigation apps get guidance from many sources, including government traffic monitoring systems. But some of the most valuable information comes from users' phones — their locations and speeds, for instance.

To be sure, apps can send drivers on routes that irritate people living along the way. Gary Heyer drives for Uber and Lyft and has used Waze on thousands of trips. Last year, he said Waze sent a lot of people through Edina and Hopkins neighborhoods to get around construction on U.S. Highway 169.

"The Hopkins Police Department, or whoever was in control, put school buses up in order to block some traffic," Heyer said. "And then Edina actually put up barricades, concrete barricades to keep traffic from going through local streets."

But Heyer believes the problem wasn't really Waze or other traffic apps. He said it's the volume of vehicles on the road, construction and traffic bottlenecks.

Traffic apps get a thumbs-up from the top regional traffic guy at the Minnesota Department of Transportation. That's Brian Kary, director of traffic operations at the Regional Transportation Management Center. He said the apps have jammed some neighborhoods at times with redirected traffic. But overall he said the apps are useful in dealing with traffic.

"It's getting people to maybe utilize some routes that would be otherwise under-utilized," he said.

In fact, Kary said the department soon will be getting traffic feeds from Waze.

"It's any kind of incident that Waze users are reporting. It could be a breakdown, a crash, debris. You know, somebody sees a mattress in the lane or something like that," Kary said.

Google has already been gathering data from MnDOT.

With the I-35W project, Kary said he hasn't seen any strong indication that navigation apps are rerouting traffic to overtaxed corridors, as happened with the U.S. Highway 169 closure last year.

He said Google Maps was sending cars to the southbound I-35W ramp from 31st Street. That is supposed to be limited to buses. But Kary said Metro Transit reached Google and got the ramp removed from suggested routes.

Some industry analysts envision a future in which people will forego their phones and rely on navigation systems built into cars. An increasing number of vehicles have onboard guidance.

It's not too big a leap to go from navigation apps that command drivers to navigation systems that help drive vehicles without anyone behind the wheel.

"The long-term play is automated driving," said Roger Lanctot, an associate director in the global automotive practice at Strategy Analytics. "So, you're going to want to have a map and ideally a very sophisticated map built into the vehicle."