I noticed something interesting over at the Official Google Blog today. The search giant’s mapping software for mobiles now includes real-time traffic monitoring. I’ve been a big fan of Google’s mobile applications for some time now, News and Local having come in really handy on more than one occasion. This addition of traffic information makes these mobile applications that much more enticing. You can also now store favorites so you won’t find yourself having to type in addresses of your most often queried locations all the time. Once you have a map up you can turn on traffic monitoring by pressing the # key. The major roads will then light up as either green (traffic moving steadily), yellow (traffic is slow) or red (complete traffic congestion).

After downloading the new Google Maps to my phone at http://google.com/gmm I used it to give me a traffic picture of my part of Oakland County. I found that the application ran reasonably quick on my Sony Ericsson s710a over Cingular’s EDGE network and the traffic monitor picked up on the fact that 696 is down to one lane between Orchard Lake and Telegraph Road. It even seems to differentiate between different directions of traffic on highways that have a median. You can switch to satellite view similar to using Google Maps on a PC and you have the ability to call up driving directions between locations.

While I can certainly see myself using this application often in the future, it is becoming a little confusing why Google is developing both this mobile version of Google Maps as well as their Google Local utility. I blogged about Google Local back in December and still use it when searching for certain types of restaurants or stores when I’m out and about. Oddly, this new mobile version of Google Maps has all of the features of Google Local except for the search function. I have to believe that one of these will eventually consume the other rather than Google supporting two separate apps.

Not all phones are currently supported, (I noticed a lack of any Palm Treo models) but Google promises more compatibility is on the way. If you own a supported phone and feel like giving your data plan a workout, go download Google Maps and start beating that summer construction traffic!