BY LAJU ARENYEKA

Have you ever been stuck in serious traffic? The sweat incensed, heat induced, bladder tormenting, thief infested, time wasting hopelessness that makes you wish you could fly, walk on water or simply pull a disappearing act. Though these could be impossible, there is an app that comes close to saving the Nigerian commuter from being stuck in traffic.

The Trafficbutter mobile app, unveiled recently, is motivated by the need to deliver to Nigerian road users the best road traffic viewing and reporting experience possible using a cross-platform mobile application.  Uche Okafor, founder of Traffic butter says the initiative was birthed out of his own dislike for being stuck in traffic.

“I used to have an office on Lagos Island and I would get stuck in traffic a lot,” he told Glamtech, “but one thing I realized was that drivers would call one another to share information on the situation of the roads per time so that they could take routes that were less traffic prone.

So I was inspired to create a system where people can help one another by providing traffic information from different locations. That’s how we began traffic butter in 2010. We’ve been able to grow a system on twitter and facebook with nearly 60,000 subscribers, and then we realized than building an app would  help us reach a wider audience and be more effective for subscribers.”

Updates are crowd-sourced by users as well as by the Trafficbutter team in real-time, for everyone to enjoy. The primary feature is the precise presentation of traffic updates on the homepage and the map landing pages.   Other secondary features include Geo Location, chat, comments with location stamp for credibility on traffic reporting, and keyword search.

Users can choose to follow roads that interest them, and receive notifications when there are new incidents on the roads they follow. The community-driven mobile App, which is free and available for use on Android, BlackBerry, and Ios devices, is available for download in each of those app stores.

Although, Trafficbutter currently covers the Lagos metropolis alone, the developers believe that the app would expand its frontiers pretty soon. Gone are the days when you wish someone had told you about the fallen tanker  at Mile 2, or the road repairs at Maryland. Now, you can control the sights, sounds and feel of your commute with the click of a button. Just be sure to keep your attention on the road!