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Mobile Phones to Monitor Traffic Congestion

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the backup-on-the-i-five-headed-south dept.

shas3n writes "In an interesting and innovative way Bangalore city, India, has come up with a way to monitor road traffic congestion by monitoring the density of mobile phones. This can give users quantitative and directional information of traffic flow without significant additional infrastructure investments. The congestion data is already available online."

16 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Houses by the roadside? by DrDevil · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They need to be careful because a number of people could live along side the road and the number of people at home will change throughout the day. As these people are not mobile, and the people change during the day, it is difficult to discern stopped traffic from people watching the television.

    I'd be interested to see if they have addressed these problems and if so, how.

  2. Uhmmm... by Etrias · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...shut up and drive?

    Just a thought.

    1. Re:Uhmmm... by Fx.Dr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      My thoughts exactly. Isn't this some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy?

      1) Moron talks on his cell
      2) Gets into accident
      3) ???
      4) Congestion!

    2. Re:Uhmmm... by MBCook · · Score: 2, Informative
      Doesn't matter.

      Now I agree completely.

      But you don't have to be talking, as long as your phone is on it is reporting to the tower. There is also the argument that someone else in the car could be using the phone (say a Taxi passenger). But this should work for people like me who have a cell phone and leave it on, but don't talk while driving.

      --
      Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
    3. Re:Uhmmm... by pthor1231 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      After all, I have no recollection of mere conversation being considered an undue safety risk in regards to driving.
      Neither did that driver have any recollection that a car was in his blind spot, but he found out real quick that it was. Just because you don't remember anything happening doesn't mean that someone else's quick reaction didn't save you.
    4. Re:Uhmmm... by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 2

      Why does the fact that the conversation is on a phone make a difference?

      Because the focus of your conversation is outside the vehicle. Add in the generally crappy nature of a cellphone signal, and your brain is really, really concentrating on something other than actually piloting the vehicle.

  3. Re:Dupe GOTO 10 by peterpi · · Score: 2, Informative

    yes.

    http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168794&cid =14070720

  4. What took so long? by sphealey · · Score: 2, Interesting

    With so many cars having GPS' factory-installed since 2000 I have wondered myself why this hasn't already been done in the US; thousands of cars uploading position reports and velocities during rushhour would provide much better information than the notoriously unreliable traffic sensors.

    Probably issues of payment for the cell phone charges and privacy.

    sPh

    1. Re:What took so long? by arivanov · · Score: 2, Interesting

      1. AFAIK someone in Seattle was looking into this more than 2 years ago. So there is nothing particularly innovative about it.

      2. You do not need GPS. In fact you do not want GPS, because this makes the data individually identifiable and you have to prove that you are not doing something nefarious with it. Paging stats and handover stats from cells located near trunk routes will be a perfectly good replacement for this. All you need is to play correlation analysis vs actual traffic stats for a couple of days. You can make them more precise by looking at how the timing advance in GSM or power level in CDMA changes, but this is the same can of worms as GPS. You have to prove that privacy is not affected.

      --
      Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
      http://www.sigsegv.cx/
  5. Great stuff - this is innovation by unity100 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    And for the people who are arguing the bicycles, pedestrians etc would mess with the actual traffic congestion, remember that in bangalore those constitute a great deal of the traffic jam too.

    --
    Read radical news here
  6. Re:Privacy by timeOday · · Score: 2

    Luckily there are no privacy issues in showing where individual cell phones are!
    Good this this doesn't do that.
  7. As opposed to what? by spaceyhackerlady · · Score: 2, Informative

    Isn't the traffic always congested in Bangalore?

  8. Missing info by Andrewkov · · Score: 2, Funny

    How come the map doesn't show all the American call center's and outsourcing firms? This is Bangalore, after all!

  9. Where have I heard this before? by evilviper · · Score: 4, Informative

    A bit off-topic, but have you heard they're going to be tracking cell-phone signals to monitor traffic patterns? It's amazing! Why doesn't Slashdot ever accept a story on the subject?

    You can read more here:

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/19/143247

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/19/074524 8

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/01/159241

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/16/076217

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/30/124324 7

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/13/042822 9

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/10/233725 9

    There, that's better. Hopefully, one day they'll come to their senses, and post a story or two on the subject.

    --
    Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
  10. Re:Infinite Loop by COMON$ · · Score: 2, Funny

    Thats ok, I just used my technical reference.

    --
    CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
  11. Re:Great! by AnonymousCactus · · Score: 2, Funny
    I've created such a service that is currently in beta. It's based on the following secret formula (expressed in psuedocode):

    if(5 am - 9 pm)
    report Traffic Jam
    else
    report slightly less terrible Traffic Jam

    Oh crap, there goes the IP holding the company together...