Useful travel app for the snow please

I got caught in last weekend's snow in the Peak District. With no 4WD it was looking highly likely that we'd be going nowhere unless the road was cleared and gritted. The next morning we did a local reccy and the road looked fine after said gritter lorry passed through. Our route was taking us onto main roads and so we could be relatively confident that a safe journey was possible.

But what if we were one of the 9.8 million people that live and work in rural areas that can't rely on motorways and major A roads? I need to know if a road is passable, that largely depends on whether it's been gritted but because national and local news needs to cater to the masses, I'm unlikely to find out if my particular route is safe. That uncertainty leads to dangerous journeys being made, cars being abandoned or essential journeys being aborted when there was actually no need to stay at home.

Pre gritter - sledge friendly

Post gritter - car friendly

So why not have a simple 'gritter' application? A simple overlay onto Gmaps, the AA or the RAC maps. Every gritter lorry is tracked and their route recorded live on the map. Over time the colour of that route fades to show how recently the road was gritted, if at all. The application can simply track the GPS location of the truck, or to make it even simpler could track the location of the drivers phone so that no extra hardware is required.

That way, we can provide highly detailed, up to the minute, local information for drivers without having to build a new resource or interfere with the primary job in hand, making the roads safe.