Cellphones to Monitor Highway Traffic 119
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."
Call me crazy...but (Score:2, Insightful)
Will it not be misused by finding the routine information of people?
Big Brother (Score:2, Insightful)
Call me olde fashioned but... (Score:3, Insightful)
I should be more 'forward thinking' for my age I suppose. Does anyone else think that our privacy outweighs the convenience that realtime navigation and itinerary interactivity could potentially provide?
Re:Measuring changes results (Score:3, Insightful)
How is that abuse? Anyone doing 80mph on a road where the limit is 55mph is breaking the law and should be caught and fined, and if they do it too many times, have their car impounded and crushed into a little cube, and then charged a disposal fee for their cube.
I have been doing a lot of driving the last few years and the amount of times I get passed by dickheads doing stupid speeds makes be shudder just thinking about it. If they knew that they were going to get caught, maybe they'd slow down a bit. And fined. Heavily. Every dollar that the government collects in fines is a dollar that they don't have to get from somewhere else (eg my taxes).
Re:The Netherlands ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The TomTom/Vodafone system doesn't use GPS coordinates being sent by mobiles, it only uses triangulation to work out where handsets are, and how fast they're moving. Highways are already equipped with detection loops every half mile or so, so this is mostly useful for smaller roads. It won't detect roads where cars are at a complete standstill though, if the phone isn't moving fast enough (e.g. less than, say, 4mph) it'll assume the phone's just in the pocket of someone who isn't in a car.
Re:The Netherlands ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Measuring changes results (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the problem is that of now, everyone breaks the law every now and then without really thinking about it. If the world got to a state where you got punished every time you broke the law even slightly then such issue would get quite serious.
In fact, I'd wager (if you have a car) that you broke the speed limit somewhere the last time you drove even if it was simply 1 to 5mph over the limit.
The real problem is that many local and state government gets a great deal of revenue from speeding and parking tickets so rather than to alleviate the core problem of they encourage quotas and sometimes post arbitrary low speed limits in order to increase revenue. I mentioned parking tickets because there was story a while back where an Apple Store offered to buy two parking meters outside their store to mark as no-parking zone for aesthetics (you know Apple) at the theoretical price of what those parking meters could provide if they were maned 24/7 365 days a year, but the city refused on the grounds it had never been done but moreover they made more money from parking tickets than the actual meters. Its the same with speeding... They don't want reduction but they want the violations.
If a cell phone system allowed them to charge violators instantly it would result in more of this at the extreme not to mention possible corruption. Recently in Philadelphia, there is a big spat between city hall and the Parking Authority [philly.com] about revenue and where it is going and complaints about corruption the the Authority organization.
My first suggestion would be to either have revenues earn not go to the gathering organization itself but possibly elsewhere like education or charity.
And if they want a technical solution, then I would argue that make it so cars can't break the posted limit rather than fining them money every time they violate the speed (and or parking). Now keep in mind, I'm probaly one of the more slower drivers out there you'll meet and you'll never see me park in a place I'm not supposed to (I'm that anal) but the issue that these organizations being allowed another way to squeeze money and make things arbitrarily "more illegal" in order to increase revenue bothers me.
None of these government bodies actually want to curb speeding. Their livelihood depends on it.
Re:Measuring changes results (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Measuring changes results (Score:2, Insightful)
We could argue about the road conditions, the rated speed of the road, or your perception that you're a good driver; none of that matters. Driving is a privilege, not a right, and the posted speed is the posted speed. Don't want to follow the rules of the road as posted? Then don't drive.
I'm not in any way saying you can't exceed the speed limit in an emergency situation. However if you're consistently speeding in defiance of the posted limit, thereby putting law abiding citizens at risk, you deserve the ticket you're going to get.