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New Projects Use Phone Data To Track Big Cities' Mass Transit Use
An anonymous reader points out a New York Times article about a traffic analysis program that
"'works by taking note of which cellphone tower a phone is communicating with. It then looks for disruptions in service followed by significant changes in location. If a phone located near Times Square suddenly loses service and reconnects at Prince Street and Broadway 15 minutes later, then it has almost certainly traveled there using the N or R trains.' In another interesting twist, the article briefly notes, 'The system will also include an experiment that uses phones' microphones to sense when riders are on buses.'" The article also mentions a similar project to track buses and trains in Los Angeles.
Such as in any subway system in China. Where reception doesn't end at the subway entrance. People are making calls and surfing the web while riding the train.
So who all gets access to this information about which cellphone is connecting to which tower, and what rights did I give to this person/entity to use it for stuff like this?
Should have RTFCA (Customer Agreement)
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
The location of all Los Angles buses by GPS is already publicly available, as well as several other transit systems. New York is piloting the same system for the B63 5th Avenue bus.
GPS doesn't work underground, but I'm pretty sure the MTA already knows exactly where all its trains are. It's just a matter of making the data public rather then trying to interpolate it using cell phone signals.
The system will also include an experiment that uses phones' microphones to sense when riders are on buses.
What else does it "sense" via the microphone?
Or just a funny coincidence?
Or so Alex Morgan Bell hopes. Mr. Bell began designing the system last year, when he was studying electric engineering at Columbia. After trying to get the idea going by himself and luring only several hundred people as users, Mr. Bell joined Densebrain, a Web development company that makes NYCMate, a transit map app (and is perhaps best known for SitorSquat, an app that maps public restrooms).
Alex Bell, figuring out new uses for the phone.
This is going to be obsolete soon. We have 3G in most of the undergound SF Bay Area BART, and, sooner or later, WiFi (it is in trial now). I am sure other cities can claim the same.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
...actually been on the New York Subway? See it's fair information.
There's no such thing as "paying for a ticket for train X for Y time on Z Day"
http://www.mta.info/developers/
Though these are just aggregates of turnstile data, so they know that X people entered at Times square and Y people exited at prince within about a 4 hour resolution(the scheduled turnstile audits). The only new thing this scheme would add is to tie the specific entrances and exits together. I'm not sure how useful that actually is, you can extrapolate the most frequently ridden lines based on the aggregate entrances and exits from it. Plus to tie it to particular riders, anonymous or not is an AWFUL lot of data to process.
> The system will also include an experiment that uses phones' microphones to sense when riders are on buses.
Yeah, that's what the experiment is for. To sense whether riders are on buses, to check mass transit ridership. Really.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So phones are maybe a reasonable proxy for riders, but it seems to me that the MTA, being a closed system which already has entry controls for fare-collection purposes, just might have more direct ways of getting at ridership, including ones that don't have smartphones. They could instrument their exit gates, too, and correlate them with train arrival times, and figure out which trains are letting off lots of passengers at which stations.
But maybe the phone thing still makes sense if they're not anonymizing it.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Other non-communist cities will not tolerate such a waste of taxpayer dolla... Oh. Rich people will also benefit from this? Then it might be a good idea! Is there any way we can prevent the peasants in the lower 98th percentile from using this system? [/conservolibertarian]
Bush and Obama are simply two heads on the same hydra, get ove it.
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
They could've at least tried to find a better excuse than that.
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
Chicago already has this for buses and trains.
This is an utterly useless app. If transit authorities want to track riders' use of the system they already have a much better sensor network, the cameras that are on board most of their vehicles. Cameras can do a pretty good job of object counting, and if given enough CPU cycles of counting the number and direction of objects moving into and out of a motion detection zone (doorway). That wouldn't even be a hard app to write, and the only additional hardware needed would be for the app to report (wirelessly I'd assume) when the vehicle returns to base.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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