Think your local commute is bad? Maybe, but at least you're not in Moscow.

In the Aug 2 eition of The New Yorker Magazine, writer Keith Gessen offers a grim account of the gridlock that grips the Russian capital.

Gessen presents the source of the city's traffic challenges as part historical (Moscow's early rulers built the city as a concentric series of walled forts, with the Kremlin at the center, preventing the diversion of traffic to side roads), part political (the city's elite are afforded driving privileges that serve to cripple the regular flow of traffic), and part cultural (while sitting stuck in traffic is not desireable, it beats the endless lines endured by Muscovites during communist rule). 

The article also discusses the innovative approach taken by Yandex, Russia's largest internet company, in the display of real-time traffic data throughout the city. While other cities use sensors embedded in the pavement to measure traffic flow, in Moscow these have a hard time surviving both the weather and the road repairs the weather necessitates. So, Yandex asks drivers to download software onto their GPS-equipped mobile devices so to that information about their movements can be sent automatically to the Yandex servers. As the program grows, Yandex is able to give an increasingly accurate and encompassing picture of Moscow's traffic situation at any given moment.