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.

Comments

Not necessary/ for most modern systems

[immakiku]

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.

Really?

[cultiv8]

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)

Re:Really?

[camperdave]

More worryingly, how did they get access to the noise level from my cell phone's microphone? I don't buy the need for them to know where I am on the bus.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could just RTFA which clearly states that its a pilot program that has willing participants. The feature has to be activated on an app.

Re:Really?

[wisnoskij]

Way to ruin a perfectly good conspiracy theory with the facts.

Re:Nextbus

[xaxa]

For the NYC subway, you pay at point of entry, and you walk through a turnstile on exit.

Is the fare the same, regardless of the length of the trip? Wikipedia suggests it is.

In the largest European cities I've visited it's not, but I live in London so I'll describe that.

In London there are 9 concentric fare zones (1 to 9, with 1 being the central zone, and few tourists venturing further than Zone 2. Property is often advertised as "5 minutes from a zone 3 station" etc). [PDF map]

The fare depends on which zones you travel through, and the time of day (peak/off-peak). e.g.: (from this ridiculous table)
zone 9 to zone 1 is £6.00 or £3.50 (peak, off-peak)
zone 9 to zone 3 is £3.50 or £1.40 (peak, off-peak)
zone 2 to zone 1 is £2.50 or £1.90 (peak, off-peak)

Hence, if you use the electronic ticket (Oyster card) it needs to know what zone you start in, what zone you ended in, and whether you went through a more central zone (from zone 3 in the east to zone 3 in the west, through the centre, costs more than taking an orbital route avoiding the centre). The Oyster card must be used to open the ticket barrier at the start and the end of the journey. (Paper tickets must too -- they have the zones they are valid in encoded in a magnetic strip)

Anyway, my point was that in London the transport network has the origin and destination data for the majority of tube or suburban train trips. It must be interesting to mine this -- you could see the effect of delays, how people respond to a planned closure, how many people don't make it home on Friday night, who goes to a political protest...

There is some sample data here but I don't want to register at the moment.

Why bother?

[cusco]

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.