Microsoft is working on a new service which will help the drivers to avoid traffic jams. According to The New York Times, the Redmond-based company is developing a technology called Clearflow, that will be available as a free software on maps.live.com.

Unlike other navigation software, Clearflow will offer driving directions by taking into account the traffic conditions and real time events. In addition, the software will analyze the traffic not only on the main roads, but on the side streets as well.

For the moment, Microsoft intends to make Clearflow available for 72 cities in the United States.

As The New York Times noted, is possible that in some cases Clearflow will compute that a trip will be faster if a driver stays on a crowded highway, rather than taking a detour,  because side streets are even more backed up by cars that have fled the original traffic jam.

The development of the new technology has started in 2003 when Eric Horvitz, an artificial-intelligence researcher at Microsoft, noticed that the side streets suggested by the navigation software were more crowded than the main roads.

“It hit me that we had to do all the side streets,” he said for The New York Times. “We really needed to understand the whole city.”

Of course, Microsoft hopes that the new technology will make its Maps service a better rival for Google Maps and other similar services.