Want to avoid getting stuck in traffic this 4th? There's an app for that

Our family will spend the Fourth of July with some friends in Lake Tahoe. This means we'll be driving Highway 80 from San Francisco to Sacramento and then on into the mountains. This 200-mile stretch is notorious for traffic and a trip that's supposed to be only four hours can easily turn into six, seven, nine, even 10 hours. I'm not kidding. It gets that bad.

We're hoping to avoid the traffic and so our plan is to leave Thursday night after 7 p.m. We'll return on the morning of the Fourth, skipping holiday activities on the lake and fireworks. We feel it's worth leaving early to avoid the traffic jams.

I was also interested in finding out if there are any apps for the iPhone that can help track traffic. It seems the best available is SigAlert. The app is tied into the state highway patrols' data and offers the most-up-to-date traffic maps available through any app.

I checked out the list of maps available for California and sure enough, they've got our trip entirely covered with maps for San Francisco, Sacramento, and Davis/Yolo, El Dorado, and Placer Counties.

You can easily zoom in and out of the maps and the app will give you estimated travel times for your selected route.

We won't necessarily gain any time on our trip by checking SigAlert and then finding out that there's a major jam ahead in Sacramento. But it will help us determine when to stop and grab dinner--and if that traffic becomes unbearable bad during our drive on Thursday, maybe we'll just pull over and stay the night in a Best Western and then hit the road early Friday morning. Who wants to sit in traffic when you have two little kids in the car?