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Cellphones to Monitor Highway Traffic

Posted by Zonk on from the using-the-fillings-in-your-teeth dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "On February 8, 2008, about 100 UC Berkeley students will participate in the Mobile Century experiment, using GPS mobile phones as traffic sensors. During the whole day, these students carrying the GPS-equipped Nokia N95 will drive along a 10-mile stretch of I-880 between Hayward and Fremont, California. 'The phones will store the vehicles' speed and position information every 3 seconds. These measurements will be sent wirelessly to a server for real-time processing.' As more and more cellphones are GPS-equipped, the traffic engineering community, which currently monitors traffic using mostly fixed sensors such as cameras and loop detectors, is tempted to use our phones to get real-time information about traffic."

6 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. I had this idea a long time ago. by caluml · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Another idea I had years ago. My idea though was to pay people to run the software on their phones (just as Google pay people to have ads on their sites - paying per hour of data uploaded, or something similar), and then lease the aggregated data to interested parties. Companies interested in building/buying toll roads, government agencies to see if new roads need to be built, etc etc.
    However, with SatNav getting more and more sophisticated, it was only going to be a matter of time before TomTom (or whoever) built a model where it uploaded your position back to them, enabling them to build up a realtime picture of traffic speeds, which they could then use to update drivers to avoid jams, etc.

    --
    Get your own free personal location tracker
    1. Re:I had this idea a long time ago. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      You don't need software, or even a GPS.

      They've been doing this for a year in Belgium, purely on a basis of cell network data (first a regional test project, turned nationwide half a year ago).

      Triangulation delivers location data with a pretty good resolution (something like 15 meters).

      All cell phones that are powered on are being tracked. The collected data are anonymized (SIM card ID removed after some preprocessing to detect routes followed), so they can see that "someone" drove a certain route in a certain amount of time at a certain time of day, but there's no way to find out who it was (otherwise the whole system would become very illegal, and we're not talking about the government here, but about privately owned companies).

  2. Re:I only care about getting me there by lukas84 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No country i know has got mass transit that allows you to ditch the car.

    I live in Switzerland, and some people argue that it has one of the best mass transit systems in the world - if that is true, other country must REALLY be in a heap of shit, because it sucks bad here.

    Mass Transit just isn't flexible enough to help most people. There are cases where it might be better than sitting on congested streets, but that doesn't make it good. If i expect congestion, i'll just take the motorcycle instead of the car - this has downsides of it's own, but it's still better than taking the train or bus.

  3. Re:The Netherlands ... by owlnation · · Score: 2, Interesting

    the UK and Germany to follow
    Surprising really, that the UK isn't the first -- since it is already leading the World in surveillance technology and legislation that violates both privacy and basic human rights.
  4. Not new. by Blrfl · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This isn't new by any stretch of the imagination.

    In 1994 (that's pushing two decades ago) I worked on a pilot project with Bell Atlantic Mobile (now Verizon), FHWA, Virginia DOT and the Maryland DOT that tracked mobile phones along the Washington, DC Beltway. The phones didn't have to cooperate, and it was also discovered that call rates went through the roof just as backups started to form. A bunch of the technology we developed ended up in some of the early E911 systems.

  5. Re:I live in tUSA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Yeah man but how much is your rent living right across the street from a T stop? And maybe walking a mile after work for something or other isn't a big deal for you but what if you were a road paver, or worked at UPS packing boxes, or a cook, or even waited tables for a living.

    It's easy to say how easy things like this are when you're coming from a position of privilege.