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Ford Testing a New 'Traffic Monitoring' Device
Poletown writes "The Detroit Free Press put out this article today about a new vehicle based 'traffic monitoring' system that Ford is testing. It will report your speed, the road temperature, whether or not your wipers/headlights are active, and even if you've used your anti-lock brakes. Initially, the system will be tested on Ford-owned and municipal vehicles."
it does all that but it doesn't drive yet!??
but seriously, what use is a traffic monitoring system - if you live in an area REALLY hit by traffic (i live near Central London, UK), there is usually almost no way to avoid it! what's the use unless you're a long distance commuter, or want to decide whether to use subway/underground or car
tim
Microsoft will soon take away Ford's glory, Bill vs Henry round two with Traffodata 04.
Nerd history of the Traffodata is located in Fire in the Valley, a great computer history book.
This would be cool if there was some way to hook up your own home PC and access the data. You could write cool python scripts to visualize your commute to work, etc.
When I have kids, I'll expect updates on all their cars' data at regular intervals.
I can't decide whether to praise this kind of "innovation" for the convenience, or to complain about the possibilities for abuse. I know we'll hear plenty of both - but I'll lean toward praising this for now. Technology will always be abused, and complaining about basically harmless things and their potential for evil is not generally productive.
This can potentially further clog the microwave/radio spectrum, depending on the range of these sensors. Also, unless some standard exists/is applied, competing manufacturers could select different protocols, leading to a babel of messages, and more traffic jams rather than less
It could have some good use as an anti-theft device.
No comments on the Orwellian overtones of the original post
This is government-funded, so they are going to be seeing the data at some time. What is to stop them from sending a ticket in the mail from the information they collected?
...don't question it!!!
The devices on them would collect traffic-related data including vehicle
speed, location and which direction the vehicle is heading.
So long as they remain voluntary, and can be turned off...
<grrr>
Hopefully this will help getting the speeding jerks off our roads. Quite frankly, I wouldn't mind having completely remote-computer controlled cars in our lifetime.
The owls are not what they seem
and wanting all this information about me? Ford wants to know this...Bud Light wants to know that...
And yet when I give these companies the information I WANT them to know about, they shred my resume.
Don't you love how the world works?
Here in Montreal, they buried a bunch of sensors into the ground under the major highways. These sensors track in realtime the flow of traffic, so you can have an instant glimpse at the entire network's traffic status, and find out where to avoid. For now it's a small portion of the roads, but it's already proven to be very effective. Can't wait until more roads have that and the map! See it here.
Wow... I can't say how much this kind of thing scares me. As an advocate for privacy, I don't want people to be able to follow my every move.
/me shudders
I realize, of course, that there are benefits of being able to track cars. Finding stolen cars, keeping unsafe drivers off the road, et cetera, but sometimes you have to sacrifice all these things for the rights of the individual. Our culture has a tendency to take ideas with good intentions and take them to dangerous extremes. Take bias censorship in schools, for example. There are extensive rules that publishing companies have in place so as not to offend children. It started in 1970 as a way to keep racism and homophobia out of schools, but is to the point where you can't mention, for example, a blind man overcoming his disability and climbing a mountain. According to these bias guidelines, that kind of statement could offend blind children.
What is the next step after this? Tracking devices implanted under the skin? Big Brother is watching you.
--Nycto
It's easy to overcome the privacy issue by having the system generate a unique session id each time the car starts. With a unique ID each time there is no way to tie the data to an indivudual. Shoot, for that matter generate a new one every 10 minutes or so.
Simple situation; you lend out your car to a friend, who doesn't know the speed zones. He missed a sign, and ends up getting nailed for going 20 km/h over the limit. You want your insurance rates to go up for this?
It's the same reason police in my province don't take give your license demerits for photo-radar infractions; there's reasonable doubt that you were the driver.
"The computer says what? Why, that must be wrong. We were just eating at that Denny's next door. I don't know, sir. If you can't prove it either way, I guess you'll just have to trust us."
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
What's wrong...
A federal agency (CIA if I remember correctly) was recently ordered by a court of law to cease 'wire tapping' the GPS and other sattelite signals from OnStar due to the fact that the surveilance interfered with the ability of OnStar users to summon emergency services.
That is a serious problem in at least 2 ways
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
Orwellian concerns are written all over this. Very good point.
:)
I also don't understand why it has to be in vehicle. Washington state department of transportation already collects much of this information on our local highways. This is done via sensors on the freeways and cameras. The sensors are paced every mile or so.
1) they can tell who has their headlights on via cameras
2) they can determine speed of cars and volume of traffic using electromagnetic sensor embedded in the freeway.
3) Road temps and weather are collected by some very nice weather stations dotted throughout the system.
4) they can determine whether or not ABS is functioning based on the accidents reported
I really see no other purpose to this than Big Brother motives. How easy could it be to link this to TIPS or what ever they're calling it these days.
I'll be placing my order for a tin foil hat soon. And maybe one for my next vehicle.
Rental car agencies are already exploiting GPS tracking devices for uncapped profit (eg. bouncing a $250 rental fee to $3.4k). I wonder how long it will take them to exploit this one so they can charge penalties for ... oh ... not using your blinker, leaving the dome light on when the car is off, and perhaps even for not flipping down the sun visors. Y'know, 5 minutes of harsh sunlight can really wreak havoc on unprotected automotive uphostlery, and possibly increase the maintenance cost for a vehicle by a full $0.000000005!!
The problem with this is just that: my CAR telling somebody about my habits? Isn't that what we have police officers for? If I let my buddy borrow my pickup to move a desk, and he speeds, I get the ticket & the insurance ding? Oh wait. Why not use the RFID tags in my clothing to make sure that I get the ticket?
But if he uses it NOW and kills someone in an accident, you are liable to be sued and your rates go up. All this without any nifty traffic monitoring device. Ain't life grand?
I assume, then, the first time you drive like an idiot, or forget to signal, you'll be prepared for the officers when you pull in your driveway.
Like they already do in New York state, where thanks to road rage laws, a simple call, "such and such a car with plates XYZ-123 was behaving erratically on this road and this time", gets you a knock at the door by a uniformed officer who reads you the riot act.
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
A friend of mine was telling me a story about this guy he knows who owns some kind of service business. This guy got all his employees some new cell phones (or something, some kind of communication gear) with GPS built in. The first week he fired something like 2 people, one of whom was taking a nap somewhere (presumably) and the other of whom was found in a very very bad part of town -- apparently buying drugs.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Embed the sensors in the roads..
I use this every day to choose which way to go home (red on Decarie (the 15) is particularly bad).
S
Slightly offtopic, but speeding tickets in the US are issued to the driver of the vehicle, not the owner of the vehicle (like a parking ticket).
In Texas, many cities are "home-rule" cities which means they can sometimes enact laws which are not specifically prescribed or proscribed by the state. In the town I live in, they issue civil citations to the owners of vehicles caught by the red light cameras. By issuing a civil citation, the city finds it easier to skirt around due process. If you refuse to pay, then you'll find yourself at the receiving end of a criminal charge for failure to pay a civil fine levied by the city, rather than being held responsible for the offense under criminal statutes.
Here's another example: We have several toll roads where I live. I sold my car a few years back; in Texas, the tags go with the car. So of course,the lowlife I sold my vehicle to decide to rack up several hundred dollars in fines for running the toll gates. The toll authority issued me a civil fine of several hundred dollars based on photographs of the rear license plate of the vehicle! Had I not been able to prove that the vehicle was in fact sold (I had a bill of sale), I would have been held liable for the fines.
So yes, in some parts of the country you can receive a citation by simply owning a vehicle caught speeding, running red lights, etc.
Apparently they can. Gene Weingarten wrote an amusing piece in the Washington Post last week that describes his failed attempt to get out of just such a predicament using the defense you have suggested. It didn't work.
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.
Here's the question, though...
Would you drive a car with the intent of being monitored if it meant that your insurance company would give significant fee breaks or if the government gave rebates of some form?
If you start to put money into the equation, things start to seem more interesting than threatening, n'est-ce pas?
You can also alleviate traffic waves at stoplights by leaving a big space between you and the car ahead of you. Then you start moving forward (and the line behind you) when the light turns, not when the car in front of you moves (difference varying by how far back in line you are).
I watched when my Kenworth T600 was in the shop, thay hooked up a system the size of a laptop and had a complete report from speed to RPM's to brake use and pressure. It even showed air pressure to the suspension giving them an idea of how much weight was on each axle. Combined with the qualcomm on board they knew within 3 feet where and what I was doing every 15 min. with the company truck.
I'm told you are what you eat, does that mean I can be you by tomorrow with some A1?
Your "conflict of interest" argument is interesting, but since all government money is levied by laws passed by the government, only an anarchist would agree with it.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Ok, monitoring the car can be good or bad. Here's a little story from the real world.
Someone had a very expensive car, the kind of car that cost a fortune to get a insurance for. So the car got a tracking device installed to get a lower insurance. These devices are normally intalled in different places hard to find unless you take the entire car apart and also has their own battery.
One day the police got a call from the company tracking these cars for the insurance company. The car appeared to had been stolen and was going down the freeway. The police got running updates of the location of the car. drove after it down the freeway and ended up "capturing" the thief in a parking lot by blocking the exits with police cars.
The "thief" turned out to be a family member not normally driving the car who had forgotten to disarm the alarm.
The alarm did not make any noise if not disarmed, it just sat there, sending the coordinates from a gps antenna through the cell phone network.
So the owner was happy to see that the alarm indeed worked but less happy about all the attention the Saturday shopping got.
The story said nothing about the price for this mistake.
I'm not saying that it isn't good to be cautious, but just because a technology can be used in a "Big Brother" way doesn't mean it will.
Yes it does, It's only a matter of time before the fed/state/local authorities start to supoena onstar.
As a matter of fact, they already DID subpoena OnStar or one of its clones. And not just to track the vehicle, but to use the phone function to BUG it. This came to light in the news media as a result of a suit by the service provider.
It seems the device is basically a cellphone (without a ringer and with a fixed number to call, and WITH a data connection to the car's computer). Inbound calls are silently accepted (the better to track stolen cars without alerting the thief and to unlock the door for customers who lock the keys in). Of course this makes bugging the occupants trivial.
The emergency signal is sent by transmitting a tone in the upbound voice channel. With a call permanently set up between the car and the FBI's tape recorder, the emergency service the company was being paid for couldn't be provided. (The tone would go to the tape recorder, rather than a call being made to the emergency service proder.)
When the FBI wanted to continue the tap after a month, the company sued to get them to release it.
(The news item carefully didn't mention which OnStar-or-clone company was involved.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
ok, thats a fair question -- the mechanics of tickets is what I believe is unconstitutional. This is how it works legally: when an officer gives you a ticket and you sign it, you agree to plead guilty and pay the ammount of the ticket (I believe legally you are agreeing to pay your own bail, but Im not sure) OR appear in court in lieu of being arrested. Infact, if you do not sign the ticket which is your right, they will take you to jail until your court date (although you'd be stupid to do it). It is my belief that this system is legal smoke and mirrors and violates your due process rights.
As for the second argument of conflict of interest, that one is rock solid, I admit the constitutional thing is just my opinion. Of course government has the right to levy taxes, but not at will. Essentially what is happening is, a policeman pulls you over, and assigns you *extra* taxes, taxes which in most cases funds his employment -- a conflict of interest. If we are going to have tickets the money should be donated to charity or used to fund government activities that have no impact on law enforcement to remove the conflict of interest.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Of course, they conviently ignore the fact that something like this will help people determine the cause of an accident and who was at fault, but the same people who complain about accountability are the same ones who drive 80mph on the shoulder during rush hour, or bob and weave thru traffic, cutting people off just so they can get to work 4 minutes faster.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Car drivers file a drive plan which works in conjunction with accurate real time traffic monitoring an on board computer that could generate an alternate route and guide the driver by way of on board navigation system: cool. but what happens when all those drives select the same route beucase each onboard system generated it from the same information? The lower volume roads will be jammed too.
Err, could the DMCA apply in some warped way to said countermeasures?
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
Bullshit ... there is no correlation between speed and accidents. Many of the fastest roads in the world are in northern Europe and they are some of the safest roadways. The real issue is driver competence.
Most drivers are incompetent.
This is due to inadequate government training and testing.
Speeding tickets are ineffective.
Many have died. Way to go leaders!
it's based on the statistical possibility
Bingo....so why collect specific data to base the rates on? Why not just use the average, where all drivers pay for the bad?
Insurance is a racket...a gamble by the companies. If it's going to be based on data mined by the microsecond, then there is no gamble. And no need to bill me if I don't have a need to collect.
That was (is?) a tempest in a teapot. Plow drivers are independent contractors who own their own equipment. Instead of paying by the hour with an expensive, invasive and objectional monitoring system - pay them by the mile of cleared road with rate modifiers based on official weather reports of recorded snowfall rate.
Back it up with spot checks by cops in the area or better yet, officially assigned inspectors - publish an 800# for Joe Random Civilian to call attention to poorly plowed roads, enough complaints from unique phone numbers triggers an inspection or with a higher threshold, semi-automatic rate reduction.
The idea is to pay for performance not incidentals because performance is what really matters. No point in an elaborate and degrading scheme when a simpler approach can be both more effective and respectful.