Slashdot Mirror
Cellphones to Monitor Highway Traffic
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."
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
Will it not be misused by finding the routine information of people?
hilarious
Will this gps information be warrantless?
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Disable javascript for all but trusted sites.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
The more I see stories like this, the more I feel that a full-on Big Brother world could be oncoming. Sure, it could provide all kinds of data on the technicalities of GPS tracking via mobile phone triangulation or whatnot, but how much danger is there that these kinds of 'experiments' could be field tests for a greater invasion of privacy? RealID or even RFID, combined with this sort of GPS tracking could provide all the pieces needed to make our highway system a channelized control mechanism.
I should be more 'forward thinking' for my age I suppose. Does anyone else think that our privacy outweighs the convenience that realtime navigation and itinerary interactivity could potentially provide?
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.
I wonder if these sort of systems might lead to real-time changes in toll prices some day. Transportation authorities could leverage real-time stats to charge more for passage during peak traffic periods, and this sort of system would accommodate unexpected increases without any additional effort on their part. It could even sense traffic congestion issues in other areas and anticipate upcoming loads. Not that I agree with such practices, just wondering if they'll be implemented. Couple this with highly expanded automatic tolling systems in the future and you've got a recipe for profit (at least for the state).
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
How is that abuse? Anyone doing 80mph on a road where the limit is 55mph is breaking the law and should be caught and fined, and if they do it too many times, have their car impounded and crushed into a little cube, and then charged a disposal fee for their cube.
I have been doing a lot of driving the last few years and the amount of times I get passed by dickheads doing stupid speeds makes be shudder just thinking about it. If they knew that they were going to get caught, maybe they'd slow down a bit. And fined. Heavily. Every dollar that the government collects in fines is a dollar that they don't have to get from somewhere else (eg my taxes).
The TomTom/Vodafone system doesn't use GPS coordinates being sent by mobiles, it only uses triangulation to work out where handsets are, and how fast they're moving. Highways are already equipped with detection loops every half mile or so, so this is mostly useful for smaller roads. It won't detect roads where cars are at a complete standstill though, if the phone isn't moving fast enough (e.g. less than, say, 4mph) it'll assume the phone's just in the pocket of someone who isn't in a car.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I thought that was the US? In the UK, there aren't armed thugs with police badges randomly shooting people. That's what *I* call a violation of human rights.
and ditched my car 7 years ago. I live in Boston across the street from a subway stop. There's another one a few hundred yards away, a third line 1 mile away and a fourth 1.3 miles away. I ride my bicycle year round for many trips 5 miles or less, and arrive faster than the subway or a car. Walking a mile is also no big deal, and I occasionally car pool if a neighbor and I are both headed to a meeting or event.
What about groceries? Smaller trips or deliveries. What about big purchases? If I ever needed one, I'd borrow a friend's car or sign on to zipcar. What about weekends in NYC? I take Acela or the bus. What about weekends in rural Vermont? I rent a car for $40 a day. The combined total of non-air travel for my wife and I: $2500/yr, and that includes a combined total of 5 months of time out of Boston. Can your car ownership costs -- insurance, gas, tires, lubes, car payment/depreciation, parking, tickets, tolls, taxes, and repairs match that?
Yeah, you can ditch your car. Doesn't mean you'll never have to borrow or rent one, but it does mean you'll likely save money, operate an auto for fewer miles per year, get a bit more exercise, have a chance to read a magazine or book while using transportation once in a while, and contribute to a higher quality of life for yourself and your community. Don't let the perfect [a completely car-free society] get in the way of the good [a society where the average miles driven per driver is under 5,000, or even less].
Support a few technologists in Washington.
How is that abuse? Anyone doing 80mph on a road where the limit is 55mph is breaking the law and should be caught and fined, and if they do it too many times, have their car impounded and crushed into a little cube, and then charged a disposal fee for their cube.
I think the problem is that of now, everyone breaks the law every now and then without really thinking about it. If the world got to a state where you got punished every time you broke the law even slightly then such issue would get quite serious.
In fact, I'd wager (if you have a car) that you broke the speed limit somewhere the last time you drove even if it was simply 1 to 5mph over the limit.
The real problem is that many local and state government gets a great deal of revenue from speeding and parking tickets so rather than to alleviate the core problem of they encourage quotas and sometimes post arbitrary low speed limits in order to increase revenue. I mentioned parking tickets because there was story a while back where an Apple Store offered to buy two parking meters outside their store to mark as no-parking zone for aesthetics (you know Apple) at the theoretical price of what those parking meters could provide if they were maned 24/7 365 days a year, but the city refused on the grounds it had never been done but moreover they made more money from parking tickets than the actual meters. Its the same with speeding... They don't want reduction but they want the violations.
If a cell phone system allowed them to charge violators instantly it would result in more of this at the extreme not to mention possible corruption. Recently in Philadelphia, there is a big spat between city hall and the Parking Authority about revenue and where it is going and complaints about corruption the the Authority organization.
My first suggestion would be to either have revenues earn not go to the gathering organization itself but possibly elsewhere like education or charity.
And if they want a technical solution, then I would argue that make it so cars can't break the posted limit rather than fining them money every time they violate the speed (and or parking). Now keep in mind, I'm probaly one of the more slower drivers out there you'll meet and you'll never see me park in a place I'm not supposed to (I'm that anal) but the issue that these organizations being allowed another way to squeeze money and make things arbitrarily "more illegal" in order to increase revenue bothers me.
None of these government bodies actually want to curb speeding. Their livelihood depends on it.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Making cars not able to break the speed limit is a massive safety problem. I've been in situations (usually on a motorway or other large trunk road) where something has happened, a guy loses control and pings off the central reservation etc and I needed the extra speed *immediately* to get out of the way. If I was already cruising down the outside lane at 70mph (UK limit) then where would I get the extra speed from? I suppose some form of 'burst' limiting could be a solution.
Also there's a huge difference between safe and not. On an empty motorway with clear vision I would say it's safe to do 90mph or up, conversely on a motorway in heavy fog it's common to see people going no faster than 50, and that's on the outside. If you're being really anal about it then some drivers are far safer at high speeds than others. There can be no technical solution to this unless there is a system in place which knows the skill of all drivers, the position of all cars, all road conditions, and is capable of making intelligent judgements about what is safe and what isn't.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
I work in the traffic engineering industry. There are two things you have to realize about speeding: first, many speed limits are set artificially low and second, speed itself isn't dangerous--it's the difference in speed that causes accidents.
The accepted method for setting speed limits is to collect speed data on all vehicles on the road for 24 hours on a typical day. This is usually done using those two rubber tubes you may see placed across the road at times. The speed limit is then supposed to be set at the 85th percentile speed of the traffic. In reality, political considerations often force the speed limit to be something ridiculous like 55 mph. If 85 percent of the traffic is doing 70 mph, that speed limit is unrealistic and will be ignored.
The other part of this is the common misconception that slowing the traffic down will make everything safer. While it is true that accidents that happen at higher speeds are more severe, accidents are caused by difference is speeds. Studies have shown that the number of accidents sharply increases when the differences in speeds between vehicles exceed 20 mph. This means that if you are the guy driving 55 mph when everyone else is doing 80, you are the one driving recklessly. Because of this fact, artificially low speed limits can actually cause accidents.
This standard from the Institute of Transportation Engineers sums everything up nicely: http://www.ite.org/standards/speed_zoning.pdf
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.
We could argue about the road conditions, the rated speed of the road, or your perception that you're a good driver; none of that matters. Driving is a privilege, not a right, and the posted speed is the posted speed. Don't want to follow the rules of the road as posted? Then don't drive.
I'm not in any way saying you can't exceed the speed limit in an emergency situation. However if you're consistently speeding in defiance of the posted limit, thereby putting law abiding citizens at risk, you deserve the ticket you're going to get.
Can I get some of tinfoil your using? It sounds like some pretty strong stuff.