We were traveling to Detroit on I-96 E this past weekend and was turned back around due to an accident resulting in the closure of the Interstate.
There wasn’t anything on the radio and we could have avoided the trip had we known about the accident. And so can hundreds of motorists everyday.
What if you got an email or SMS alert about traffic alerts, road closures, etc?
A good friend of ours, Suresh, pointed me to a service called Nixle Alerts that did just this. Naturally, I checked it out as soon as I got home. 
Nixle became the first public networking Company to partner with Nlets. Because of this relationship, Nixle technology is integrated into the Nlets closed network public safety system.
Nixle provides communities throughout the country with news and information that is both proximate and personally relevant. Nixle makes this information instantly available over, SMS, mobile application, email, and web.
Nixle lets you register for a free account and based on your address you can sign up to get alerts from Governmental agencies that are using this service like
- Local city government
- County health department
- County Homeland security & Emergency Management
- County Sheriff’s Office
- County 911
- Department of Agriculture
- National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
You can pick and choose the advisories, traffic alerts and community news you want to receive via email or SMS. I signed up for an account immediately and set it up to SMS me traffic alerts and email me all other alerts and advisories from other agencies.
Guess what? It paid off right this morning as another accident on the road I take to work this morning was closed. I got an SMS alert warning me of that.
The service works around the US and I highly recommend you try it. One nice thing about this service is that you can set it up to stop sending alerts during any time single time period. I set it up so it doesn’t send me any alerts from 9pm to 6am.
