Place automated radar guns on major roads to measure average speed of traffic passing by. Make the data publicly available for drivers. The cheapest method might be a low-strength AM radio signal from an area hub that lists the fastest/slowest routes the driver is near. This would require no new equipment in cars. More expensive means would be a color-coded map or list displayed in a dashboard unit. Speed of the route could be expressed as a percentage of AvgSpeed/SpeedLimit.
The signal could also be relayed to emergency vehicles looking to avoid slowdowns, or to police if the average speed grossly exceeds the road's speed limit.
Privacy concerns might shoot this one down, but if people receive the benefits of the system and are assured it won't be used for individual traffic ticketing, it might just fly.
Why not measure volume instead? You'd need a counter smart enough to look up and down the road to see how many cars are there. Gridlock moves so slowly that you wouldn't know if there was one car passing every 10 seconds because there's a jam or if it's because there's hardly anyone on the road. Besides, drivers would not be as likely to avoid traffic if they knew it was moving along quickly.
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Forget AM, use mobile telecoms. Hook the data in to the car-GPS, so that it can tell you, like in an internet download, the estimated arrival time based on current speeds of traffic on course. Then the GPS system, given your destination can recalculate the optimal path.
It is a great idea, just the data needs to be integrated to the routing systems we're evolving so the whole system works as a single intelligent guide.