Testing Verizon’s SMS Traffic Alerts on a 950-Mile Interstate Drive

During the Independence Day weekend in the United States, Verizon Wireless introduced a temporary traffic notification service developed in collaboration with Autodesk Location Services. The offering, delivered via standard text messaging (SMS), supplied motorists with updates about roadway incidents and significant slowdowns along user-defined routes.

As a Verizon subscriber, I decided to evaluate the service on July 5th, configuring alerts for a long-distance trip I planned to take later in the week. The journey would stretch roughly 950 miles, connecting Huntsville, Alabama to the New Jersey coastline. The route relied heavily on the interstate system and passed through several high-density metropolitan corridors, including Knoxville, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia—urban areas where traffic bottlenecks are common.

Setting up the service required entering a starting point, a destination, and a time interval during which updates should be delivered. The system also allowed users to define a second time window for the return leg of the trip, making it suitable for recurring commutes or round-trip travel planning.

Once activated, the alerts began arriving at regular intervals. As anticipated, the most congested corridors generated the majority of notifications. One message warned of heavy northbound traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike at the interchange with U.S. Route 206, with potential delays approaching 45 minutes. Another notification described an accident expected to add approximately 15 minutes to travel time, along with an estimated clearance time. Over the duration I selected, approximately fifteen alerts were delivered.

In its official announcement, Autodesk Location Services characterized the initiative as the beginning of a broader portfolio of location-enabled services being built for Verizon Wireless. Joe Astroth, executive vice president of Autodesk Location Services, described the TXT Traffic Alert Service as a way for subscribers to anticipate difficult driving conditions and adjust their plans in advance—particularly useful during busy holiday travel periods.

From Verizon’s perspective, traffic information complemented its expanding lineup of text-based alerts, which already included weather forecasts, sports results, news headlines, and financial updates. Jim Straight, vice president of wireless Internet and multimedia services at Verizon Wireless, noted that both company research and external analyst reports—such as findings published earlier that year by IDC—consistently ranked traffic data among the most sought-after mobile information services.

Following the holiday promotion, Verizon outlined standard pricing options. Customers could either pay per message at a rate of $0.02 each or subscribe to tiered monthly packages: $2.99 for 100 messages, $4.99 for 250 messages, and $9.99 for 1,000 sent or received messages.

From a broader perspective, the initiative represented an early-stage deployment of location-based services (LBS) within the U.S. wireless market. Although many mobile devices were already equipped with chipsets capable of transmitting positional data, this particular service did not yet incorporate dynamic geographic filtering. Users could not, for example, restrict alerts to incidents occurring within a predefined radius of their real-time location.

The logical next evolution of such systems would be geo-fenced notifications—alerts triggered automatically when a device enters a specific geographic boundary. Under that model, traffic, weather, or other event-based updates would be contextually relevant to a subscriber’s immediate surroundings rather than tied only to a preselected origin-destination pair.

Even so, simply receiving timely information about incidents and knowing where to access more detailed data represented meaningful progress. Several state departments of transportation had already begun publishing roadway conditions and construction updates on public websites. Minnesota’s Twin Cities transportation portal, for example, provided digital maps displaying active roadwork and traffic disruptions. While downloadable traffic maps for PDAs and mobile phones had existed for some time, Verizon’s initiative stood out as one of the first U.S. services to push near real-time traffic alerts directly to drivers along a specified route via SMS.