Cellphones to Monitor Highway Traffic

Posted by Zonk on Saturday February 2, 2008 @09:33PM 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."

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Re:I only care about getting me there by lukas84 · 2008-02-02 22:24 · 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.