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."

Comments

Re:I only care about getting me there

[lukas84]

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.

Re:Measuring changes results

[jacksonj04]

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.