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Bluetooth Used To Track Traffic Times
First time accepted submitter ChanukahZombie writes "The City of Calgary, AB has introduced a new traffic congestion/timing information platform for drivers. 'The system collects the publicly available data from Bluetooths to estimate the travel time and congestion between points along those roads and displays the information on overhead message boards to motorists.' Currently only available on the Deerfoot Trail (the city's main highway artery) but will be 'expanded in the future to include sections of Crowchild Trail and Glenmore Trail in the southwest.' As for privacy concerns, the city says it cannot connect the MAC address collected to the device owner."
They can log everywhere they see the device. Just don't get into any trouble..
Isn't this what TrafficCast has been doing for years?
http://www.trafficcast.com/
As for privacy concerns the city says it cannot connect the MAC address collected to the device owner.
Until they arrest someone and subpoena any data related to that person's MAC. Then they've got a nice bit of tracking data.
TFA is low on details re: what Bluetooth devices are being monitored. I know my cellphone and laptop have Bluetooth support, but I keep that mostly turned off. Do all cars in Canada come with built-in Bluetooth tracking technology? Triangulating from actual cellphone signals appears to me to be a more fool-proof if not spook-proof technology. The limited range of BT devices do make them a better choice in terms of privacy.
"the city says it cannot connect the MAC address collected to the device owner."
Not yet. But soon enough.
Of course no government or private entity would ever start tracking speeds of drivers and start sending owners of the phones speeding violations if they're deemed to be speeding, right?
Of course, if you live in Calgary and you have to drive anywhere via Deerfoot, Crowchild or Genmore anywhere near rush-hour times you're painfully aware of how congested the traffic is, no need for realtime updates when there's 40 cars of stop and go in front of you.
Surely that should be "blueteeth"!
If they only need the MAC addresses for the time that the device is traversing the system, then there's no reason to log the data for long term. TFA doesn't say how long they keep the data. Were the journalists too stupid to ask that obvious question, or did the government say "We'll get back to you"?
I always have bluetooth disabled because I don't use it for anything and don't know anyone else who does. Used to be used for ear pieces but now most smartphones have perfectly fine speaker phones that make having an earpiece pointless. They are also uncomfortable and you look like a crazy person when using them.
I have a page with links to other examples of, and discussion about, bluetooth traffic monitoring; see http://kegel.com/bluetooth-roads/
When they ran the pilot last year (or was it two years ago) I found it useful and actually was fairly accurate. Deerfoot bottlenecks and congests at certain points every day and once you are past those it moves along OK if there aren't any accidents, blizzards, etc. If I see an estimated time that is way larger than the usual time including bottleneck congestion I'll probably try a different route. I was surprised and happy to see it up and running yesterday.
Could have saved them a bundle with my competing technology, a sign that says "5:30am to 8:30pm: congested"
...but come on, does anyone here really believe that if you choose to enable your Bluetooth device that others are not free to interface with your device to the extent that they can uniquely identify it? If you don't want to be tracked, maybe you should think twice about turning on Bluetooth.
Personally I think this is an ingenious use of technology. You people are so paranoid about privacy. You seem to be able to find a sinister side to everything, don't you? Come on, get over it. Let's celebrate creativity instead of always raining on people's parade.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
They are already doing this in Houston. See here: http://traffic.houstontranstar.org/bluetooth/transtar_bluetooth.html
It seems that every comment so far has centered on the privacy implications of the collection of MAC addresses, I'm a little more concerned with where the collection of a few more bytes of data could go. I'm a few years out of the parking industry now, but the big new technology just few years ago was the use of OCR to collect license plate numbers in real time. I recall an industry presentation hawking a handheld device that could take a picture, and do the computation with little noticeable delay. It seems to me that it's not a huge technical leap to combine these, and build a super-duper tracking system. They've already tied your license plate data to your identity, after all.
A bit off-topic, but have you heard they're going to be tracking cell-phone (and accessories) signals to monitor traffic patterns? It's amazing! Why doesn't Slashdot ever accept a story on the subject?
You can read more here:
http://slashdot.org/story/05/11/19/143247
http://slashdot.org/story/05/11/19/0745248
http://slashdot.org/story/05/11/01/159241
http://slashdot.org/story/05/10/16/076217
http://slashdot.org/story/02/12/30/1243247
http://slashdot.org/story/02/06/13/0428229
http://slashdot.org/story/06/08/10/2337259
http://slashdot.org/story/07/08/31/168228
http://slashdot.org/story/12/11/28/2318245
http://slashdot.org/story/06/11/05/2220211
http://slashdot.org/story/02/10/14/1224244
There, that's better. Hopefully, one day they'll come to their senses, and post a story or two on the subject.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
... and didn't cost huge bucks that will probably be in our next tax budget.. sigh.
Waze is seriously cool, we've gotten out of town on Friday rush hour many a time, using it to avoid accidents and congestion. Anyone who has a phone (and a passenger who can safely enter data as you go to report trouble areas) should contribute; the more, the better.
The basic idea is that you use a set of Bluetooth receivers interspersed along a traffic corridor and attempt to track unique MAC addresses through the corridor and thus you can come up with an average, near real time, travel time through that corridor.
Some of the more interesting parts of doing include a car full of people, each with a cell phone and a laptop and quite possibly the car's own Bluetooth system. So while it is good for averaging speed and validating other measurement methods, it is not very good for counting the number of devices moving through a corridor.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
[sarcasm] Outlandish as it may seem but someone might have the technology [/sarcasm]
Another friggin example of how Calgary keeps wasting my tax dollars. First the distraction law, then a noise law (96dB, my bike's stock exhaust is illegal), now some stupid monitoring system... I'll tell you the real-time traffic on deerfoot, if its rush hour..its slow hour, if there's a single snowflake in the air...its a parking lot, if it's below 0.. parking lot, rain... parking lot too!
Yet.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Google collects WiFi MAC Addresses, and possibly some random data which was broadcasted in the clear and never encrypted in the first place, and they get yelled at.
They collect BlueTooth MAC addresses and say it's ok.
I mean either way it's a MAC address.. jeez.
CALTRANS uses loop detectors in freeways and major roads to monitor congestion. They just count cars in each lane and measure how fast they're going. They've been doing that for over two decades. You can see the result at . LA used to have a dedicated cable channel with that data. No privacy-invading user-identifying technology needed.
The data is used in several ways. The most important one is that when the system detects high traffic density at slow speed at one sensor, and lower density at higher speed at the next one in the same direction, it means trouble, usually an accident. The traffic detectors report the lanes separately. If something is blocking a lane and traffic is going around it, that's detected too. Cell phone and Bluetooth monitoring won't give you that.
CALTRANS has had cameras (which you can watch on line) on high poles over freeways for decades. Some have pan, tilt, and zoom capability, so when the automated system detects trouble, someone can use a camera to look at the problem area and dispatch whatever is needed.
Another use of this data is to control the metering light system at on-ramps. Freeway throughput peaks at 35 MPH (at higher speeds, the cars have to space out more) and cars are deliberately delayed a few seconds at on-ramps when speeds drop below that level.
Both of these functions require reasonably accurate data, but there's no need to identify cars individually. This all works quite well without it. Probably better. Counting all the cars on a second by second basis is more useful for detecting problems fast than some statistical measure of some of them.
The data also goes out to web sites, apps, driving time predictors, etc. There's an free API, integration with transit data, integration with CHP incident info, a developer group, etc.
A truism of traffic management is that fast response to trouble on a freeway increases the capacity by about one lane, and it's a lot cheaper than adding a lane.
So I'm not too impressed with some small-scale trial that snoops on Bluetooth headsets.
It's been done in the Netherlands on dozens of locations already. Also, "anonimized" cell tower information (GSM/3G) is being used by TomTom to do the exact same in several countries.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
It's a perfectly cromulent word.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Some of the highways around Philadelphia now have a similar system, but I believe they may use the EZPass toll collection RFID tags to get travel times.
The system collects the publicly available data from Bluetooths to estimate
Wouldn't that be Blueteeth?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
if it is to improve our daily acts think we should try to implement new technological solutions.
Try It
The city of Houston, TX has been doing this for a few years with great success. It's more accurate than using loop detectors in the roadway and not to mention cheaper. Instead of having to shut lanes of traffic down to cut the roadway to install detectors, they just have to mount antennas near the side of the road.
The same system is being installed around Boston, MA and other localities. I love seeing the sign and knowing how long it is going to take me to reach a certain point. It takes a lot of stress out of being stuck in traffic. Less stressed drivers means traffic loosens up and moves more freely, instead of people bunching up on each other's cars and causing a traffic jam.
Additionally, the data will be publicly available, so mapping applications on GPS devices and smart phones can show traffic congestion in realtime, giving people the opportunity to plan alternate routes more easily to avoid congestion, and thereby reducing congestion.
Whew! This water sure is cold!
Personally I think all of these traffic monitoring and display the results on big expensive signs for motorists to read systems to be a waste of money. The monitoring side makes sense from a traffic monitoring/control point of view. Its the big expensive signs to tell motorist the results that I think is bogus. If I'm driving all I need is a green/yellow/red light, possibly arrow shaped, to tell me which lanes to get out of, into or worry about. I don't need a bunch of signs each costing 100's of $1,000 to buy/install/maintain. People need to remember the difference between data and information. Information is useful data.
The Houston, Texas TranStar traffic mapping system already uses bluetooth and other wireless systems to track traffic. They go into detail on their website.
> Houston TranStar's AWAM System detects vehicles equipped with enabled Bluetooth networking devices, including cellular phones, mobile GPS systems, telephone headsets, and in-vehicle navigation and hands-free systems.
http://traffic.houstontranstar.org/bluetooth/transtar_bluetooth.html
How would they differentiate between people walking along the street with their phones in their pocket and BT-enabled cars driving along the same street, if all they're basing the collection on is the device MAC address?
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
You'd have to sieze one of the suspect's devices, or stake out their driveway and wait for them to leave their house with a bluetooth device turned on, then get their traffic logs retrospectively for however long this data is retained. What an insulting comment. "We don't retain the data longer than 12 hours" is the only relevant promise. Is someone challenging these guys publicly? I thought Canada had a "privacy minister" or something? It's about time he did something in his own government instead of picking nits with Facebook's web design.
The city of Minneapolis also estimates travel time and displays the information via over-road screens. I'm not sure how they calculate the trip time (I don't believe it's via bluetooth), but it's a waste of effort, time, and thus money
Here's why it sucks: The display boards are infrequent - there's like 1 board along my 25 minute drive, and I drive via heavily traveled highways and freeway. Because they are so infrequent, I can only obtain trip length information for half of my trip.
Here's what they should have done: Hired a developer to create Android and Apple apps which pull trip information from Google Maps for each individual's specific route. Google Maps already adjusts the estimation for trip time when additional traffic is on the road. Google has already done the calculations - no need to reinvent the wheel.
Further more, the trip time is virtually worthless by itself. It only serves to give you a realistic expectation. Ideally, we should suggest alternate routes, for example, leaving the freeway early and driving on a less traveled frontage road. If they took off optimized the number of travelers on the freeway, it could speed up the average speed of those on (and off) the freeway.
No trees were killed to send this message, but a great number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
FYI, Calgary does have a lot of these systems in small scale use, including over 70 traffic cameras as you mentioned.
I, for one, am quite impressed with the setup - instead of years of construction digging up every lane of the highway to install induction loop detectors, they can install these detectors which are (presumably) cheaper, quicker to install, and more easily changeable. As a Calgary resident, I would find it annoyingly ironic if they caused a bunch of constuction delays to install a system which is intended to help prevent driving delays. In addition, I could see this system being added to more and more roadways or integrated with traffic signals, etc. at very low cost.
With regards to your comment about a free API, Calgary currently does have a free API for public transit data, and I have no doubt they will be making this data more accessable in the future.
We're also talking about two entirely different populations - LA has 3.5 times the population and double the population density.
So, while I agree that having perfect information per lane may be an advantage in some scenarios, there is also a huge cost/benefit tradeoff. Any solution which uses tech in an interesting and cost-effective way to provide a useful service? Thumbs-up.
Similiar systems have been in used at airports for years, to measure waiting times at security checks etc. The ones that measure road congestion can be bought off the shelf, or can be rented (when a construction company works on a stretch of highway for instance). This is really old technology, and I wonder how it ever got up to Slashdot's front page.
there was this case, when aol released search data together with a pseudonymous user-id. Many people got uncloaked, because first they searched for their own name or some other identifiying information, then for something like sex toys.
So the bluetooth-data isn't anonymous, too. Now they have the MAC and your traffic pattern, and when you have your device with you when you're alone somewhere i.e. in a police office, they may collect your MAC and connect it to your full name. When they later get access to the "anonymous" traffic database ... it isn't very anonymous anymore.