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Tracking Traffic Jams With Cell Phones
kaufmanmoore writes, "Companies and governments are looking to alternatives to expensive radars and road sensors to track traffic jams. Two Atlanta-based companies are aiming to use data from wireless carriers to mark how fast phones are moving and overlaying that with maps to calculate traffic conditions. One of the companies, AirStage, has already partnered with Sprint-Nextel and the Georgia DOT to cover Atlanta's notorious traffic. The plans raise obvious privacy concerns over the usage of the data of your cell phone's location and the accuracy of this data." From the article: "[The] systems rely on wireless companies allowing them to process the data from their towers that calculate the position of each phone about twice a second when it's being used and once every 30 seconds when it's not. [One company's technology] can track vehicles to within 330 feet without using Global Positioning System satellites. Its software is designed to weed out the difference between pedestrians and drivers, then crunch it into detailed color-coded maps that show average speeds along roadways."
If he had a cellphone, this could really screw things up.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
If the phone companies strip identifying information from data one might be
tempted to think there is no problem in making this information available.
However, the privacy concern may not be limited to the ability track a specific phone, which they would probably require court permission to do.
There are lots other uses, and abuses of such technology, such as finding where tonight's big party is located, which local watering hole is over-capacity, how much traffic the local liquour store (or street corner dealer) is getting.
Even if such uses were void of personal data, they provide data about the location,
whether that be a private home or a business.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/05/2
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/10/2
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/19/14324
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/19/07452
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/01/15924
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/16/07621
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/30/12432
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/13/04282
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
Hey no harm in wishing!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I say no.
We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.
“Causing Traffic Jams With Cell Phones”
Once someone has an accident you can all report the incident and resulting congestion right away!
Why bother.
Also... roads don't change their location (except during a 10.5 in California). Overlay movement data to road maps. Picture cell phones in dots on a screen. If you see a flow of dots on a screen, moving at > 20mph at any point in time, that's a road. Track one dot; if it slows down and then goes > 5mph, it's still on a road. If it stays under 3mph while others move faster, it's now a pedestrian or otherwise disqualified from the flow.
Privacy issues are not as bad as people think; anyone with a GPS-tracked 911-enabled phone made in the last 3 years is being tracked while it's on. Anyone concerned with privacy should also consider that their conversations go through the network of the very provider that knows where they are; talk about Aunt Midge's cancer treatments can be heard just as easily. Whether third-party snooping can be done depends on encryption, and that doesn't count the person 10 feet away who heard the credit card number just used to place an order of pizza. People in general complain about privacy and fail to realize just how much technology encourages them to compromise it themselves.
I would encourage the responsible use of this tech to track traffic patterns in a non-personally-identifiable way. A unique ID assigned to a dot, with as little info as necessary to track movement; no link to an account, etc. The cell provider already has the info, so they can control its use between departments by translating one unique ID to another and severing the link between the two. I do this for HIPAA-safe medical claims; de-identify the patient and the rest is valid data that can never be traced back.
For the most part in the Atlanta metro, mass transit, or public transit will, for the most part, only work inside the perimiter. With the outlying metro counties commute averaging 35 miles and 50 miles one way is not unheard of, transit lines sufficiently long enough would be a problem to create in this area. I knew people who were commuting from Aniston Alabama to the King/Queen Buildings (about 100 miles one way) as well as from Chattanooga to Downtown (about 115 miles one way).
And what gets me isn't so much as the capacity of the roads here, they've just ingeniously devised such wonderful bottlenecks (Spaghetti Junction, 75s/285e and the fact that it faces directly into the Sun during the summer months, The downtown connector where i75/i85 merge) and they work slower the poured molasses in the frozen arctic. I live up 575 and since May they've been working on an building a lane from Exit 7 to Exit 8 (1 mile) which would allow a large portion of the bottleneck there to avoid merging with continuing traffic, and they are still not done! And lets not forget GA 316... Though that's a nightmare, when they start construction on it, hell on earth would be a description...
This brings another part of the Atlanta metro area's traffic into light... The non-highway roads are extremely screwed (and most of them named Peachtree) to the point it's easier to get on the freeway for one mile and take the 10 minutes to go that one mile, than it is to drive the city streets, which can take you 5 - 10 miles to get to the same point and are a convoluted mess worse than the highways here.
And about the Norther Arc, that would have been great. I commuted 55 miles one way (I refuse to live Gwinnet County) and Highway 20, which is one lane each direction has fully loaded semi trucks driving from Canton to Lawrenceville. Couple that with school buses and it's not unheard of to take an hour and 45 minutes to go Highway 20. If an accident happens on Highway 20, you're screwed. Without GPS navigation or extremely decent maps (and the ability to read them) you will not be able to get around the accident and even if you get to a point that you can turn off to get around that accident, following the country roads can take a half hour to go a few miles up the road to get around the accident. Country/County roads here make absolutely no sense and you don't know you're coming up on the road you need/want until you have nearly passed it.
For another description of Atlanta's screwed up roads..
But fewer roads isn't going to work here in the Atlanta Metro Area... We could definitely use more intelligently designed interchanges.
As a side note: Some students at Georgia State created a video to see what would happen if people here drove the speed limit.... People actually pulled off on to the shoulder to get around them...