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Using Cellular Traffic to Monitor Traffic Jams
An Anonymous Coward writes "The BBC has this story about Scots company Applied Generics and their plan to use cellphone location data to determine where there are traffic jams and (presumably) generate (and sell?) evasive routing tactics for drivers. They are using both passive cellular traffic (what you get when the phone is switched on) and active (drivers phoning up to say they'll be late - in standing traffic, I hope) to look for clusters of immobile cellphones along major routes. The whole idea has a sort of "why didn't I think of that?" neatness. Personally I wouldn't mind my own traffic being used wholesale (aggregated with thousands of other users), but how do other /.ers feel about a company profiting from data emitted by the cellphone that they paid for?"
The general rule is: add road capacity, and more people will drive. Inevitably a technology like this will feed back into mobile guidance systems based on GPS, with the final result that every road, major to minor, will be congested equally heavily. Building new roads or using smarter routing techniques will not cut traffic congestion. Living closer to work and using a bike or walking will.
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Next in the same series: using cell locations to guide missiles to achieve more casualties. The high-tech way of saying "shut-up!".
They use this to determine if you've been speeding?
:)
"Jim, this guy only took 5 minutes between node 1 and node 2, he must have been travelling over the speed limit!"
Oh well, I guess they've secured funding for this project that way
they also indicated, for how long trafic had been stopped/slow. The article makes mention that this technology isn't that functional because it doesn't give any indication about the reason for the slowdown, but if there is a time period associated with the trafic jam, driver could make assumptions about what the problem was, and wether or not to find alternate routes.
It doesn't seem to use any personal details, just how many phones are switched on in a certain area. I suppose that major office buildings with lots of office phones could cause problems (appearing as a localised traffic jam). Go for it I say, it would seem to make life easier.
You call me a pedant? I prefer the term "correct"
I don't have any problem with them using my cellphone's location like this - that information is already out there (or the phone wouldn't work), so this is simply a matter of an ancillary benefit. As long as nobody's actually tracking me, personally... and if I were worried about that I'd turn the cell phone off.
in lieu of the fact that MS et al. have teamed up to work on their own cellular nightmares, how long it will be before they get their hands on this? New marketing slogan: "Microsoft: We know where you've been today"
Never attribute to Hanlon that which can be adequately attributed to Heinlein.
Based on cellphone data, drivers are advised to avoid driving through areas such as football stadiums and shopping malls.
Won't the signals from pedestrians' phones just mess up the results, especially in large cities - How can you be sure that a sufficient number of signals are from phones currently residing inside a car?
.. or something like that. LOL
This company isn't profiting from data emitted by the specific cellphone you paid for, they're profiting from the collective data emitted by all cellphones around. What's wrong with that? Why would it be wrong for anyone to listen to a certain (group of) frequenc[y|ies] and produce statistical information from the data they receive?! I personally think this is a great idea and if you are having problems with someone receiving the data you send out on a certain frequency then don't send it where everyone can receive it.
0x or or snor perron?!
This idea has been floated before, many, many, years ago (can't find a link but there must be one) trouble was back then, the number of cell phones in use wasn't large enough to use effectively, oh and the annoying fact that you probably should triangulate the signal as opposed to just calculating time between nodes.
The Final Word
> It relies on the fact that, when switched on,
:)
> cellphones are in regular communication with
> the nearest base station, giving a precise
> location for the phone.
> As the user moves around, their phone sends
> signals to other base stations, allowing the
> network's computer to log their route.
Depends what you mean by "precise". By monitoring signal strength at all nearby antennas very carefully, you could get a reasonable fix on the UE location (but throw in a couple of tall buildings, and accuracy starts to go out the window). Currently the base stations will do this monitoring just well enough to ensure proper inter-cell handoff. That doesn't require getting an "accurate" fix on your location at all. If it were possible, it would already be done as an alternative to (e.g.) GPS.
On a large motorway (or interstate, or autoroute, or whatever you have in your country), this would probably work very well. In an urban area with lots of interconnected roads and lots of buildings (full of stationary people at their desks), I don't think you'll be able to pinpoint the jam to any useful accuracy.
Still, might serve well as an "early warning" system, so you can decide where to send the traffic helicopters.
These sigs are more interesting tha
there seems to be a BIGASS traffic jam inside that skyscraper over there! I think this is a dumb idea. it's not like people turn off thier phones when no on the road. And there is going to be a higher concetration of cell phones turned on inside of office buildings than on the street. And the buildings can be retty damn close to the street too. it could look like there is a major jam at a street corner for example, when in reality, it really is just an office building that has alot of mobile phone using tenants.
Getting access to the carriers network isn't something the major carriers do happily. All of them salivated at the idea of providing highly accurate traffic data to both the transit authority, companies and consumers, but they couldn't stop bickering enough to move ahead. Most of the arguments where over the value of the technology, but whether they should develop it in house and who should lead the effort.
For those who want to know more about cell technology here is a slide about CDMA, which talks about GSM and TDMA. It's biasd towards CDMA, but the information is still good.
I think of this as an application of remote sensing. This just saves putting a helicopter in the air to physically *look* at the traffic. You paid for your car. Are you upset that others would use the photons reflected from your car to give traffic reports? Geesh...
Do they have a deal with the phone companies to get this info, or are they setting up there own monitering stations?
With the high crime rate and all that in our beloved country, there are a couple of security companies that install a tracking device in your vehicle to enable them to recover it when it gets stolen/hijacked. This device presumably uses GPS and sends the "breadcrumb" data to a control center over the GSM network or via radio.
Each morning while sitting in that jam they call rush hour, I think to myself why on earth don't these companies make use of this data (possibly having their clients opt-in, since the tracking is normally only activated in an emergency).
This would probably be much more accurate than using the mobile signals - on the other hand, I think the FCC made it mandatory to phase in GPS or some other locating device into mobile handsets.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Yes, fellow ./'s, we can all see the future now.. in 15 years time you want a new mobile, so you set aside one hour to scan the net for the phone, one week's paycheck to pay for it (and the accessories, et al), and you book a meeting with your lawyer two months ahead for an hour long interview to go over the contract with a fine tooth comb.
No, I'm not being paranoid: "Paranoia is where you THINK someone is out to get you."
PS: How exactly does a company prove that personal information has not been stored/sold/etc?
Yes! Now when someone honks at me for driving recklessly and paying attention to the phone instead of the road, I can flip them off, and self-rightously think, "I'm helping the situation."
The next logical progression from using cell phones to annonymously show where there's congestion is to use them to tell who is speeding. Data could be more easilly collected for where to best set up speed traps - and the data being fed back can keep the "hot spots" up to date.
Eventually, they'll find that billing the speeding ticket to your cell phone provider is cheaper than running all of those black helicopters to keep a physical eye on everyone. When it becomes legal to fine all of the occupants of the car for speeding (four cell phones, four tickets), then passengers will have an incentive to keep their driver legal.
I recall reading an article about the guerilla war in the Philippines where the rebels and the government soldiers were calling each other up and taunting them. Victory by humiliation.
I have been pwned because my
What we need is corporate transparency, just like the governmental transparency the people of the world have slowly been winning, but in this case we need it from the people who now have the real power; it's not enough for them to tell us that they're trustworthy.
Transparency is great, transparency is one of the things that makes Open Source such a powerful concept. Find out why we now need Open Source corporations here.
I thought the reason businesses weren't already tracking cellphones was because it is kinda a privacy issue... the data could be horribly misused if cellphones could be individually identified. Why not just imbed a generic "I'm someone's car and I'm here" chip in every car and track that?
sir_haxalot
stuff |
Here's a link to a Washington Post link ($$$ since it's a couple years old). Scroll down a bit to get to the article/link.
But the DC area was considering this along sections of the Capital Beltway back in '99.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
You had more than one phone? I'm sure there are people out there with three or four. Not to mention any passengers phones.
...
Stop at a shop and everyone within a mile gets diverted! You'd get the roads to yourself
Suppose an accident happens somewhere on the road, people will start calling and the density of mobile phones in the area will get bigger, so the system will conclude there is a traffic jam. But the people going in the other direction might just be on an nearly empty road. How will the system be able to decide for wich direction there is a trafic jam? This gets even funnier when intersections this happen on an intersection of roads (where most traffic jams occur). Based on the cell info you might conclude there is some kind of traffic jam, but you will never know to wich road in wich direction this applies. Here in Holland loops are placed in the road wich detect passing cars and there speed. This information is much better localized and gives more info about how big the jam is. In some places this system is also used to warn the upcoming trafic there is a traffic jam ahead.
Great idea. I like it. I wish I'd thought of it.
But what happens when there is a coach full of executives? A coach with 60 people and 60 mobile phones. Would the system read this as 60 cars full of people?
Good idea but some problems I think.
Insanity is just a state of mind.
is to cut my commute in half by buying loads of second-hand cell phones and packing them into a fleet of station wagons strategically driven by hired teenagers.
The problem with this is that since the cells can only handle a maximum number of users, the "top" of the curve will be chopped off, not showing the true "jam".
Have you ever tried to phone home in a traffic jam?
I agree. Even in case you are actually paying the phone company (Ie in a phone converstion vs. stand-by) and this data is used solely to determine a "degree of congestion", I would not consider this company stealing anything. I don't consider highway patrol eating from the money I payed for my car as I pass a traffic monitoring camera. (...OK forget about those times you pay a speeding fine ;-)
...But I guess cell phone data of the type "X is at Y", or "X is making a call at Y" doesn't add a lot to current traffic info. By the time this system has figured out there is congestion at some junction based on cell phone calls, the congestion will allready have spreaded (at approx. 20km/h in opposite direction) and you are likely to be just in the middle. To provide evasive routing and traffic speed control you need much more accurate data at very low latency.
To build a predicitive model, you could use data of individual cell phone routes. For large data sets this could result in a very acurate model of comuting traffic, which could be used to find predictive patterns.
So how about a company tracking your whereabouts through your cellular? Even in case your privacy is "respected", wouldn't that be frighning?
The police here in Sweden has been using mobile position for a couple of years now. It's been used in some high profile crimes like the murder of two police officers a couple of years back.
(80% of the swedish has access to a cellular phone in their home, actually there are more celluars than cars)
Here in Sweden we're not as concered as the USA citizens of the Big Brother/1984 scenarios. Just check out our national statistics also everyone in sweden has a nationwide unique number based on our birthdate. Great to use a unique identifier in databases...
Swedens biggest mobile operator has a service where you can find your friends
though I have no idea why you would use it.
Mobile Friendfinder in swedish and only for swedish people.
/J - to know recursion you must first know recursion
Good troll, almost fell for it...
We have something like this in Belgium, where mobile phone users can ring a central service to warn of traffic jams and delays. It works well, only it's about 30 minutes delayed, so occasionally you hear warnings of accidents and traffic jams that have already cleared-up.
The best use of this service is when they warn about 'ghost drivers', meaning idiots who are driving down the highway on the wrong side of the road. I wonder if a cellphone-based system could detect this as well?
My blog
This seems to be a system in development for the UK. We have a lot of motorways, and other major routes, which do not go anywhere near cities, major offices, and especially not pedestrians. In the cases where they do (for instance, the M6/M5/M42 through Birmingham) I would have thought the software would learn that 70% of the phones in a specific area are slow-moving/stationary due to being inside an office block and that if the percentage does increase, it is a possible traffic alert.
There are less advanced ways but more reliable means of doing this, using bridge-mounted devices to measure the speeding of vehicles (on the motorway below the bridge). We already have a system in the UK that does this - I'm not sure about the rest of Europe.
On a slightly off-topic note, there is currently a game in the UK played via your mobile (link from www.channel4.com) called x-fire, that uses this kind of mobile location methodology to determine how close you are to other players in the country. It's electronic paint-ball! Kind of fun. [originally this came from Sweden I think]. It disturbed me that a company could access the location data of my cell-phone without me having to sign a release-form. Just a simple phone call to an automated system is all it takes to set yourself up in the game.
We are in the kind of wierd situation at the moment were it would be illegal to use data associated with individuals like this. However, the phone companies have to retain it for RIP purposes.
Anyone seriously worried about privacy would use a prepaid mobile (cash payment, no contract).
I don't have a problem with this any more than I would a helicopter passing over me and recording the visual "data" of me sitting in a traffic jam. A more relevant analogy would be someone tracking the data of how many phone lines are paid for in a certain city block to measure population density (versus flying over and counting houses). As long as there's no eavesdropping, there's no problem.
Can I bum a sig?
Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries! Now go away or I will taunt you one more time.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
...at least until somebody develops some sort of auto-gyro apparatus that is able to hover relatively short distance above the ground. That is the technology I am waiting for. Just think of the possibilities available with that technology! News stations could theoretically use this amazing technology to fly employees above city streets to report on traffic buildup as it happens! This Cell information using company better hope these vehicles remain science fiction for a long time to come, otherwise it could seriously cut into their bottom line.
Put a CPU & wireless network card in every car. Any car powered up becomes part of a computing fabric, aware of all the other cars and their position, abd able to intelligently route & prioritise traffic.
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
Mobiles in Buildings: They would effectively count as "noise" to the system. They are the same every day, the system is looking at unusual build ups of mobiles in one area.
(crowd control?)
People with 15000 mobile phones in their car: as long as they are moving, it's irrelevant.
Odds of succeeding, bloody low. You may as well use the AA traffic systems which have already been installed. (Those big blue poles)
In Japan where essentially everyone carries a mobile phone, at a big event such as a fireworks display, you can tell when
there is a critical density of people around because your
cell phone cannot acquire a channel.
DaimlerChrysler has been working on systems like these for a long time. Check out www.fleetnet.de for an example.
Fleetnet is about ad-hoc networks. Cars build up connections while they are in radio contact, and can exchange data. Suppose an accident happens on the highway. Cars directly behind could detect that an accident has happened, and start slowing down. Cars passing by in the other direction could pick up the information and start sending and warning other cars they drive by, warning them about the upcoming traffic jam.
The nice thing here is that the system is decentralized, and this makes it (in theory) harder to profile single users. Also, the information lives only in regions where it is relevant.
cu
Lars
They are using both passive cellular traffic (what you get when the phone is switched on) and active (drivers phoning up to say they'll be late - in standing traffic, I hope) to look for clusters of immobile cellphones along major routes.
Hmmm. Passive traffic could be a term for a traffic jam.
I don't think it means drivers calling to say they'll be late. That would be active. Passive is probably something like a "Hey, I can be reached from this antenna's coverage area." signal.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
It'll cost you some extra money as it's a commercial 0900-phonenumber which you have to call to tell the highway and spot where you saw the check, but on the other hand other people will do the same for you.
If everyone invests a little, the earnings are big enough :-)
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
Both sides get screwed. I've seen it many times on I-95 or the Jersey Turnpike where the accident is on my side- I'm slow for a few miles. Once I pass the accident the other side is a giant parking lot becuase they are trying to see why all those funny lights are flashing!
And in an intersection- it just got worse. So I don't see this as a problem. Besides, if it is just traffic and intersection will get bogged down anyway. The occaisional driver wants to make that left hand turn, blocking those in his lane that want to go straight, waiting for the oncoming traffic to break. Happens all the time in DC.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
drivers phoning up to say they'll be late - in standing traffic, I hope
Blow it out yer ear. Just because you can't chew bubble gum and walk at the same time doesn't mean the rest of us should be hampered. If you can't drive without being distracted you shouldn't be driving, period.
Mention the idea on Slashdot, and it appears three months later.
Nice.
Granted the data will be used to create a non-specific statistical model, but in order to do that, they'll have to collect data on individual phones. If someone has that data, how long before the police show up, asking that the where-abouts of a particular phone for the last three days be pulled from the raw data?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
How about Using Cellular traffic to predict traffic jams. Chances are if many people are on phones or using their PDA's while driving, there'll be a traffic jam soon. (not to call the kettle black and say i never talk on the phone while driving tho)
dm
I don't care if they listen to the signals generated by my cell phone. That is harmless, and you are on public roads, so they have the right.
Now if they are *listening* to your conversation and using voice recognition to determin if you are commenting on the trafic situation, then that is totally different.
To go with the off topic post: I'm all for public transportation, taxes in congested areas, etc... but at least here in the US, it has a long way to go. I could take the bus from my neighborhood to work, but it would take me 2 hours to make the 20 minute trip. Aside from the other issue that the bus only goes twice a day.
I don't own a cell phone... it's just one more way for "them" to spy on me.
A company I used to work for developed a cellular phone location system that used phase-angle of arrival technology.
While the system was originally developed for E-911 purposes, the system could also be used as a fairly accurate traffic probe (among other things).
Using ordinary equipment will enable you to detect stalled traffic by finding static lumps of traffic in a particular cell. But about all it's useful for is finding jams.
Using a system that's accurate allows you to determine the average speeds on all roads in the area (assuming you can correlate the phone to a particular road and there are enough phones in use at the time).
The privacy freaks (of which I'm one) are nervous about exploiting the system for tracking people. If properly implemented, the system would completely decouple any identifible information when using the system for traffic analysis.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
This situation as is perfectly legal in Canada for the folowing reason. The airwaves are public property, you can listen to any fewquency you want as long as you don't broadcast of the restricted ones. This is the same reason why rf scanners are legal and listening in on cell phone calls is not a crime.
There is already a system for spotting/watching traffic jams that I would consider more reliable than trying to guess if X ammount of phones are still at X intersections or is it a new batch of X phones there? Traffic cameras! you can watch it in realtime or see stills on the web in quite a few major cities I always check in on them before I leave work (washington D.C. area) and know if my way home is blocked or moving slowly... but I suppose if we didn't track everyone by their cell phone we would be stiffling innovation. cell phone signals are private last I remember.
The greatest right given is the right to be wrong...
Here's a paper from Ericcson that gives more detail about triangulation accuracy. Essentially the best you get is something like 100 meters in urban areas, depending on the method.
It also depends on the equipment used, but I assume that mobile phone network operators install that extra equipment anyway for location based services.
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
I saw a news item on this exact technique a couple of years ago. It was used to monitor traffic in an interstate highway, in the NE US, maybe PA. I do not remember exactly where. Anyway, since I have not heard any followup on the story it either has failed or it has become an everyday tool for highway monitoring that nobody mentions any more. Except of course when it gets rediscoverd some place else.
Well, if you're really desperate, you could buy a couple dozen phones and store 'em in the back of your car - instant traffic jam! Watch as the roads clear up in front of you! :p
OK Kitt, make me a good route.
Michael, are you sure we should create false cellular information just so you can show someone your belt buckle?
Have you read my journal today?
I don't give a rats ass if they use my signal, if it means I can get to work on time.
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Me fail English? That's unpossible!
Transguide in San Antonio (and presumabilly in other cities) is doing some of this now. I don't think they sell alternate routing, but the X minutes to I10 signs are kept up to date by looking at cell traffic.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
this spring there was major construction along my normal route to work, and the delays that go with it. I looked for alternate routes, and tried several. After stop lights the alternate routes at best were equal to the main road in time. I got better gas milage because I was driving slower, but they routes were also enough longer that I used more gas anyway.
When they start making alternate routes that work, then perhaps this will be helpful. However people are not like packets, you route my /. request through London, and I will not notice the delay despite crossing the pond twice. Route me across town in my car and my 1/2 hour commute (without construction) turns into 3 hours.
A joint project run by University of Maryland and another Virginia school (UVA?) in partnership with US Wireless has been doing this for years in the DC area... they are still trying to get the accuracy up but it looks very promising. Check out this for more info: http://www.engr.umd.edu/~lovell/lov01.html . I believe they are tracking only analog and TDMA signals for now, but may expand to CDMA.
Isn't it already possible to monitor what radio stations are being listened to in cars? I remember seeing something on TV about how ratings are calculated, someone sits on the side of the highway with some device and can take readings. I have no problem with someone knowing what radio station I'm listening to, or if I have a phone on, so long as they're not listening in or modifying the signals at all.
I totally agree. As a corrolary to that, I have a big problem with companies that broadcast on the public spectrum and then say it is illegal to use their signal without paying them. Like satellite tv and radio.
Hey, I didn't ask to be bombarded with their broadcasts, and I have no contracts or agreements with them, yet they send signals right to my house. Why shouldn't I be able to do whatever I want with those signals? (Including decrypting them and watching/listening to them, if I can) If they don't want me to use them don't send them to my house!!
Same goes for cell phone and any other broadcasts. The people/companies that send out the broadcasts have to accept the risk that entails. If they want it to be private they should ensure that themselves, not rely on the law for protection.
Laws that do offer protection for public broadcasts by prohibiting listening (cell wiretapping laws) or decrypting (DMCA) should be eliminated. Wiretapping laws make sense for wires, and other technologies that are inherently private, not for broadcasts, which are inherently public.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
Operator1: Holy Poopoo look at that roving Jam, no one's ever gonna get through that one...
Operator2: Umm, dude, Its just 40 people with cell phones on a double decker bus.
Being called a dork on Slashdot must be like being called the retard in special ed.
Well, bright guy, I'm turning in finished projects. Isn't that good enough...?
The other excuse (they don't say) seems to be "Wish *I* could work at home, but I'm a manager and can't manage from home... Oh well, if I can't get what I want why should I let you..."
*calms down, grabs greasy coffee from break room*
"Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased. Thus we refute entropy" - Spider Robinson
I can hardly wait till they start reporting "There seems to be a massive traffic jam in the first year psych class on campus" because 500 people didn't turn their phones off.
What about all of the pedestrian traffic? At least half the people on the steet have phones, which will probably rival the people that have them turned on in their car. The data will show cars running over people all of the time, and other fun stuff like that.
Why use cellphones. You could create loops in the road and detect traffic with that.
That is done at 50% of the highways in the netherlands and the result of the currect traffic is even visible by a web browser: current traffic
I have also discovered that you can can tell when there's a big crowd in Japan by opening your eyes and looking! *gasp!*
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
I will taunt you one more time.
I will taunt you a second time.
I've lived in DC. Let's look at your assertions:
Metro is packed in like a sardine can - Only happens at rush hour.
Your commute is a 20 minute drive - In DC at rush hour, this equates to a 10 minute WALK.
I don't think you've looked very hard for alternative transport.
ABC news describes this being done in the Maryland/Virginia area back in December 1999:
Under a $750,000 contract, U.S. Wireless Corp. of San Ramon, Calif. will install computer equipment on cellular towers that will monitor the location of cell phone users as they drive on a 15-mile stretch of the Capital beltway south of Washington. Cell phone use will be monitored between U.S. 5 in Maryland and the interchange of Interstates 95, 495 and 395 in Springfield, Va.
Eat Lamb, 1 million coyotes can't be wrong
So, this system will figure out traffic jams by determining what cell phones aren't moving... right?
Each cell tower has 0.3-2.0 mile radius of coverage, right?
So, I'm driving down the road, and roam to a certain cell, then get out of my car and walk to the library, where I sit down and read a book for 2 hours. My phone is still affiliated to the same cell site. Does the system think I'm stuck in traffic for 2 hours, since my phone isn't moving between cells anymore?
How about when you're driving in a caravan of 40 cars and when you stop at a rest area or gas station, for 20 minutes? How about arriving at your destination? Is that more statistically significant to the system due to the larger number of subscribers, and now it will think there is a traffic jam?
How about roads with high-occupant-vehicle lanes (aka "express lanes")? Those lanes are typically right next to the "regular" lanes, so the system can't differentiate between a cell phone in the regular lane and the HOV lane. The HOV lane is moving at 55mph, but the regular lane is moving at 10mph. Each car in a HOV lane has 4 people, each with a cell phone, and each car in a regular lane has 1 person with a phone. The system can't possibly be accurate in this situation.
Hmm. So most cities don't have an even dispersion of cell phones among various neighborhoods. I'm betting that lower-class people are less likely to have a cell phone, and less likely to talk on it while driving.
So would a system like this under-report the traffic in lower-class neighborhoods? Would that cause more money to be poured into traffic mitigation in higher-class neighborhoods, simply because there are more doctors and lawyers talking on their cell phones?
-ted
They were doing that in Calgary, Alberta last year! I remember reading about in one of the free newspapers on my way to work.
I apologise, my verbatim MP knowledge is sadly lacking.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
My question is, why haven't they done this with like the onstar system. Or have they? It would seem to me, that if you wanted to make the most money, you'd offer these units for cheap, use their data to find where problem areas were, and charge a monthly fee (of let's say 10 dollars) for traffic data.
If the onstar unit was cheap enough (less than 100) and it offered data that would allow most people to get to work on time, I can't see why people wouldn't find them a invaluable.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
Houston has a similar system based on toll tags, Transtar
Here is basic description of the process.
For more detail minded folks, here is a feasibility report and a technical report on a prototype field test.
In the US, the radio spectrum is owned by the people (and licensed out by their reps). Anybody can receive any kind of data they want (transmitting is regulated, tho).
No one can rightly argue that what they are doing is wrong. They are just monitoring the locations of radio transmitters and doing some advanced modelling to relate the locations to traffic data. This is a smart move and benifits all (as long as they don't apply for a patent on the process).
As far as personally tracking people (for speeding tickets and such), since they don't have access to the ESN database (to match your phone up with you) this is not an issue. Now if the government were doing it... But then there'd be the problem with passengers and their phones... Basically this is a non-issue.
This could be another reason why UBL avoided them.
Personally I wouldn't mind my own traffic being used wholesale (aggregated with thousands of other users), but how do other /.ers feel about a company profiting from data emitted by the cellphone that they paid for?"
How's this any different from the news features you always see around the time of any big media event (SuperBowl, final episode of a popular TV program, etc. etc.) about estimating viewership by how many people flush their toilets during the commercials?
This page accidentally left blank
I was in st ives, at cornwalls biggest new year party or something this year (hardly saying much, cornwall has a population of about 100,000 - spread over a 60mile by 30 mile county).
There were a few thousand people there, and as in most of cornwall I dont get a signal away from the a30, I figured I'd beat the crowds. at 11:55 I rang my parents and kept them on hold (the crowd were about 5 seconds behind the tv countdown too).
Tried ringing my sister at 12:05 and no luck.
plan: stay sober enough to not throw up and be able to think ahead
They'll sell the information to companies that build billboards to find the best places to put them up. So next time your in your car stuck in a jam and look up and see that huge new billboard you can call your friends to tell them all about it.
I worked out this idea a decade ago, and even pitched friends at Qualcomm about it. They didn't feel it would be that good a product at the time. Perhaps this time it will actually get done.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Is working on a similar project, except this will use information from buses.
I believe you have a valid point, but only if your place of business was the only place to which you travelled.
Most people don't live within walking distance of their local supermarket, clothing store etc...
Not to mention how difficult it is to walk home with 6 bags of groceries, or even to take them on to the subway/metro.
cell phone companies should then lower the cost of airtime for cell phone users since some company is profitting from our air time.
either that, or cell phone users get a discount everytime they access traffic information of this sort so that it balances out and acts as an incentive for more people to get cell phones and join in this evasive traffic orgy.
At every major sporting event, 40,000 cell phone users will be sitting very still in a highly concentrated area. Will the system report bogus traffic jams whenever large groups of people (many of whom will have cellphones) gather near a road?
This is THE 1st article on this concept
I didn't know traffic jams were hard to locate. I have no trouble at all finding them (every damn day.)
---Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote.
Hey, that's a way for a city to end traffic problems: just set this up in the city, and then make cellular phones illegal in cars and there you go, no more traffic. And everyone can go online and check to see that there is no traffic. But then the mayor would have to set up a bunch of cell phones that are constantly on and surrounding his office so that people think the traffic is so bad that they can't get their angry mob through gridlock to burn down his house and ride him out of town on rail... Seems like something Mayor Quimby would do.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
"but how do other /.ers feel about a company profiting from data emitted by the cellphone that they paid for?"
/.er's, go suck a cock.
These little Slashdotters can go FUCK THEMSELVES. How do you feel about the satelites in space that are taking space-photos of your home and property and profitting from them ? How do you feel about the environmentalist dirt worshipping propaganists profitting from the data colection of weather data over your property when they fly their stupid fucking UFO space ballons to collect fake temperature data ? HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE KID WHO LOOKS AT NATELIE PORTMAN'S HOT BODY, AS SHE WALKS BY ON THE STREET, AND PROFITS MUCH IN PLEASURE BY JERKING OFF TO HER GOD-LIKE BEAUTY ?!
FUCK OFF
"but how do other /.ers feel about a company profiting from data emitted by the cellphone that they paid for?"
/.er's, go suck a cock.
These little Slashdotters can go FUCK THEMSELVES. How do you feel about the satelites in space that are taking space-photos
of your home and property and profitting from them ? How do you feel about the environmentalist dirt worshipping
propaganists profitting from the data colection of weather data over your property when they fly their stupid fucking UFO
space ballons to collect fake temperature data ? HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE KID WHO LOOKS AT NATELIE PORTMAN'S HOT
BODY, AS SHE WALKS BY ON THE STREET, AND PROFITS MUCH IN PLEASURE BY JERKING OFF TO HER GOD-LIKE BEAUTY ?!
FUCK OFF
Another problem that I see is that there could be a lot of traffic, but few cell phone users. Cell phones are ubiquitous nowadays, but that could definately happen anyways.
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Morph3ous.net: A synergy of art, technology and innovation.
Thanks to Railtrack and the fantastic transport policies of the British government, trains (and underground) are the most expensive and unreliable and unsave in the whole of Europe. Unfortunately, I will have to continue commuting by car even if I'd like to use the trains. Moritz.
At least you HAVE a subway system. The closest thing to that that we have is a line running from the Minneapolis/St. Paul Internation Airport to the Mall of America, and that's not even completed yet. (It's also completely useless for all the rest of us.) The busing system (Metro Transit) is decent, but a far cry from any environmentally friendly excuse for a transit system. (I see an awful lot of buses running with only one or two passengers. That said, I don't go to downtown much.) The electric busing system they have in San Francisco would be a great thing to see, although it would probably be ending up run by coal power. :/
[insert witty comment here]