Cobb County's commute app

Cobb County is booming right now. The Atlanta Braves are moving there in 2017, construction is well underway on the Northwest Corridor Express Lanes along I-75 and a huge water main project is about to begin in Marietta. The county is hoping to help your commute around the growth with Cobb Commute, a new traffic tool.

Vanja Thompson is new to Cobb County. She's still learning the roads and major landmarks.

"We moved here from Memphis, Tennessee in July. It's very challenging but I'm getting to know it and I use my navigational system all the time to get around," Vanja says.

She's excited about using the new Cobb Commute App to map out her ride before she hits the road. "I'm always just following the instructions that the lady on the little app tells me to do, but when I hit traffic I'm lost because I don't know alternate routes, so to be able to plan that before I leave the house would be great," adds Vanja.

For the first time citizens have access to the same information created in the county's Traffic Management Center.

"What it does is provide road status, any construction, any outages, as well as traffic speeds for all the arterioles," explains Sharon Stanley, the Director of Information Services in Cobb County.

In real time, you can even check major intersections before you start your ride. "As you can kind of see up behind us, we have the traffic cams behind us, those are also as you zoom in," shows off Sharon.

The mobile website cost about $40,000 to make, and only a few short months to get up and running. "Our aim was to create something very user friendly, that we didn't have to put instructions out there, make it very few clicks," she adds.

It's just in time for several big construction projects that will slow you down. "We're really excited about it. We think it gives citizens access to things they don't have on other travel apps," Sharon states.

Vanja sure plans to put it to use, "It will save lots of time I'm sure,"

Using the "Cobb Commute" website on your phone is simple, it's not an app you have to search for and download, it's actually a website you can save to your smartphone home screen. The mobile version runs great on all devices.

This is the first wave of mobile sites and apps for Cobb County.  They're working on several others right now, to help taxpayers who want more mobile services.  It's all part of a penny sales tax approved for information services.