ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 26 -- United States Patent no. 12,260,500, issued on March 25, was assigned to Apple Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.).

"Representing traffic along a route" was invented by Christopher D. Moore (San Francisco), Aroon Pahwa (Palo Alto, Calif.) and Yaohua Hu (Mountain View, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Some embodiments provide a mapping application that has a novel way of displaying traffic congestion along roads in the map. The mapping application in some embodiments defines a traffic congestion representation to run parallel to its corresponding road portion when the map is viewed at a particular zoom level, and defines a traffic congestion representation to be placed o...