Using Cellular Traffic to Monitor Traffic Jams 219
An Anonymous Coward writes "The BBC has this story about Scots company Applied Generics and their plan to use cellphone location data to determine where there are traffic jams and (presumably) generate (and sell?) evasive routing tactics for drivers. They are using both passive cellular traffic (what you get when the phone is switched on) and active (drivers phoning up to say they'll be late - in standing traffic, I hope) to look for clusters of immobile cellphones along major routes. The whole idea has a sort of "why didn't I think of that?" neatness. Personally I wouldn't mind my own traffic being used wholesale (aggregated with thousands of other users), but how do other /.ers feel about a company profiting from data emitted by the cellphone that they paid for?"
I don't see a problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Wouldn't work in most interesting cases though (Score:5, Interesting)
> cellphones are in regular communication with
> the nearest base station, giving a precise
> location for the phone.
> As the user moves around, their phone sends
> signals to other base stations, allowing the
> network's computer to log their route.
Depends what you mean by "precise". By monitoring signal strength at all nearby antennas very carefully, you could get a reasonable fix on the UE location (but throw in a couple of tall buildings, and accuracy starts to go out the window). Currently the base stations will do this monitoring just well enough to ensure proper inter-cell handoff. That doesn't require getting an "accurate" fix on your location at all. If it were possible, it would already be done as an alternative to (e.g.) GPS.
On a large motorway (or interstate, or autoroute, or whatever you have in your country), this would probably work very well. In an urban area with lots of interconnected roads and lots of buildings (full of stationary people at their desks), I don't think you'll be able to pinpoint the jam to any useful accuracy.
Still, might serve well as an "early warning" system, so you can decide where to send the traffic helicopters.
Mobile positioning and the law (Score:3, Interesting)
(80% of the swedish has access to a cellular phone in their home, actually there are more celluars than cars)
Here in Sweden we're not as concered as the USA citizens of the Big Brother/1984 scenarios. Just check out our national statistics [www.scb.se] also everyone in sweden has a nationwide unique number based on our birthdate. Great to use a unique identifier in databases...
Swedens biggest mobile operator has a service where you can find your friends [shorl.com]
though I have no idea why you would use it.
Mobile Friendfinder in swedish and only for swedish people [mobileposition.com].
Time shifting... (Score:3, Interesting)
We have something like this in Belgium, where mobile phone users can ring a central service to warn of traffic jams and delays. It works well, only it's about 30 minutes delayed, so occasionally you hear warnings of accidents and traffic jams that have already cleared-up.
The best use of this service is when they warn about 'ghost drivers', meaning idiots who are driving down the highway on the wrong side of the road. I wonder if a cellphone-based system could detect this as well?
British use (Score:2, Interesting)
There are less advanced ways but more reliable means of doing this, using bridge-mounted devices to measure the speeding of vehicles (on the motorway below the bridge). We already have a system in the UK that does this - I'm not sure about the rest of Europe.
On a slightly off-topic note, there is currently a game in the UK played via your mobile (link from www.channel4.com) called x-fire, that uses this kind of mobile location methodology to determine how close you are to other players in the country. It's electronic paint-ball! Kind of fun. [originally this came from Sweden I think]. It disturbed me that a company could access the location data of my cell-phone without me having to sign a release-form. Just a simple phone call to an automated system is all it takes to set yourself up in the game.
You can tell when there's a big crowd (in Japan) (Score:4, Interesting)
there is a critical density of people around because your
cell phone cannot acquire a channel.
Re:How long before.... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's always just been a threat, and no real action was taken.
London is big on high-tech solutions ot congestion (Score:3, Interesting)
But anyhow, the new ocngestion charge (£5 per day to drive in London) will involve cameras scanning your number plate. And to this they add centrally controlled trafifc lights so they can reduce congestion by creating gridlock outside their areas, allowing the traffic inside to clear down. All very sophisticated.
Houston Transtar Similar (Score:1, Interesting)