Traffic guru Tom Vanderbilt discusses Twitter and traffic at Salon.com:
On an early Friday morning rush hour last month, a Seattle-area web designer named Michael Micheletti was driving his BMW, “check engine” light blazing, to his dealer to be serviced. In some kind of disharmonic convergence, the car gave out a few miles from the dealership—dead in the middle of I-5, one of the nation’s busiest corridors. At 7:51 a.m., the following tweet appeared, under the handle “Mikeym”: “That black BMW stalled in the center lane of I-5? Yeah, that’s me. Sorry, I don’t like it either.”
The ensuing traffic jam, as local news outletsnoted, attracted some attention in the Twittersphere. The Washington state department of transportation used its feed to counsel drivers—at least those who were on I-5 approaching the BMW and looking at (or listening to) their Twitter feeds, and who happened to be followers of either @mikeymor @wsdot, around 15,000 in all—to “give Mike some room.” At 8:09 a.m., the denouement was revealed: “Tony from AAA here to help me. I bet my BMW looks really stylish on this tow truck.” The epilogue was there on Twitter, too, for those wanting to follow it to the end: Mikeym took a VW Golf and a Subaru Impreza out for test drives, before finally settling on a Hyundai Genesis. (On March 27, he noted: “There are two different people at this Hyundai dealership who drove up in BMWs to do some car-shopping.”) He gave the BMW to his son (“family tradition,” he tweeted on March 29).
