Naturally starting with a number of American cities, the traffic reports in your Windows Phone 'Maps' application are being improved with better data coming in from the two teams, but Borton has given us a list of countries that can expect the new service in the near future:
Soon we’ll be introducing traffic data for selected cities in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. If you live in any of these countries and the Windows Phone Maps app doesn’t currently show a traffic option, expect to see it become available sometime in the next few weeks.
Original traffic reporting on the left, new traffic reporting is on the right.
As we noted at the time of the original announcement:
The changes also apply to the Maps app on Windows Phone, as shown in the screenshots below. Unfortunately the "show traffic" menu entry is only displayed when your phone's region+language setting is set to English (United States). You can switch the region setting to United States, activate traffic, and then switch the region setting back, but in this case traffic will be stuck to on (with no way to clear the map). Microsoft would be well advised to provide a silent background update, or software update, for those markets where traffic information is now available, to rectify this issue as soon as possible.
The good news that the Windows Phone blog confirms that Microsoft will be doing a silent update. The show traffic menu entry will become available in countries where traffic data is available "sometime in the next few weeks".
There's more at the Windows Phone Blog.