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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.
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?!
> 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
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."
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.
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.
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 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
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?
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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.
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?
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
This could be another reason why UBL avoided them.
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
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
Oddly enough, it's usually the people that react the way you just did that really can't drive and talk on a cell phone at the same time (they think they can, and they're very adamant about it, but in reality, they can't).
The proof is in the pudding, of course. I just really resent any legislation which tries to pander to the lowest common denominator because of the overreacting soccer moms screaming "think of the children!"
And yes, I do feel that way about a lot of laws. :-)
If I lived in DC, or any whear near a Metro stop this would make sence. As it is I have to drive 45 min to the Metro stop. Then an hour on the metro and walking to work + cost of metro. Compare that to just driving all the way in, and it takes less time, and costs much less.
There are no public transportations alternatives that do not take over 3 hours round trip from out where I live. So driving in is it...