NPR graphics editor Alyson Hurt discovered that this month’s blizzard was showing up in Google Maps as traffic delays, and whipped up a little script that took regular screencaps of Google Maps’s traffic layer. She then created an animated GIF from the screencaps. The end result (above) dramatically shows the storm sweeping across the mid-Atlantic states.

Andy Woodruff then took Hurt’s script and created an animation of an ordinary day of Boston traffic. For a “quick, crude” script it certainly seems to have potential. [via]

PlowNYC is the City of New York’s official snow removal website. It allows New Yorkers to, in real time, “(1) track the progress of DSNY spreader/plow vehicles; and (2) confirm the snow designation of City streets (i.e., primary, secondary, tertiary, or non-DSNY).” [via]