is anyone familiar with these? i find it hard to believe that
transportation planning agencies are 1) this progressive and 2)
legally able to do this and 3) able to get the wireless carriers to
cooperate without a regulatory stick forcing them to do it
seems one way to avoid the big brother issues would be to only track
govt employees. not the best sample
-----
Posted on Sat, Oct. 15, 2005
Your cell phone could be a new traffic control aid
Missouri completing deal to monitor thousands of phones to map
traffic conditions across state
By David A. Lieb
Associated Press
JEFFERSON CITY, MO. - Driving to work, you notice the traffic
beginning to slow. And because you have your cell phone on, the
government senses the delay, too.
A congestion alert is issued, automatically updating electronic road
signs and Web sites and dispatching text messages to mobile phones
and auto dashboards.
In what would be the largest project of its kind, the Missouri
Department of Transportation is completing a contract to monitor
thousands of cell phones, using their movements to map real-time
traffic conditions statewide on 5,500 miles of major roads.
It's just one of a number of initiatives to more intelligently manage
traffic through wireless data collection.
Officials say there's no Big Brother agenda in the Missouri project.
The data will remain anonymous, leaving no possibility to track
specific people from their driveway to their destination.
But privacy advocates are uneasy.
``Even though its anonymous, it's still ominous,'' said Daniel
Solove, a privacy law professor at George Washington University and
author of The Digital Person. ``It troubles me, because it does show
this movement toward using a technology to track people.''
Cell phone monitoring already is being used by transportation
officials in Baltimore, though not yet to relay traffic conditions to
the public. Similar projects are getting under way in Norfolk, Va.,
and on a stretch of Interstate 75 between Atlanta and Macon, Ga.
But the Missouri project is by far the most aggressive -- tracking
wireless phones across the whole state, including rural areas with
lower traffic counts, and for the explicit purpose of relaying the
information to other travelers.
In fact, it would be the biggest system of its kind in the world,
said Richard Mudge, a vice president at Delcan Corp., the Canadian
company that won the Missouri bid.
The contract is expected to be completed within several weeks, and a
cell phone monitoring system tested and implemented within six months
after that.
Governments have had the ability to measure traffic volume and speeds
for years. They can embed sensors in pavement, or mount scanners and
cameras along the road. But those methods require the installation of
equipment, which must be maintained, and can take only a snapshot of
traffic at a particular spot.
In contrast, ``almost everyone has a cell phone, so you have a lot of
potential data points, and you can track data almost anywhere on the
whole (road) system,'' said Valerie Briggs, program manager for
transportation operations at the American Association of State
Highway and Transportation Officials.
Although most new cell phones come equipped with Global Positioning
System capability that can pinpoint their locations, the tracking
technology used for transportation agencies does not depend on that.
Instead, it takes the frequent signals that wireless phones send to
towers and follows the movement of the phones from one tower to
another. Then it overlays that data with highway maps to determine
where the phones are and how fast they are moving. Lumping thousands
of those signals together can indicate traffic flow.
A Delcan demonstration Web site developed for Baltimore uses various
shades of green, yellow and red to show block by block whether
vehicles are moving at or below the speed limit. As rush hour started
on a recent work day, observers could watch as green turned to yellow
and then red on roads heading out of downtown.
The Missouri and Maryland plans assume that the contractor will
market more detailed information to the private sector -- automakers
that offer onboard navigation systems, cell phone companies, shipping
businesses or media that broadcast rush-hour traffic reports.
The private marketing helps drive down the states' cost. Missouri
expects to spend less than $3 million a year on the service, Rahn
said, although the exact price won't be known until the contract is
completed.
---
You are currently subscribed to telecom-cities as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To
unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Manage your mail settings at
http://forums.nyu.edu/cgi-bin/nyu.pl?enter=telecom-cities
RSS feed of list traffic:
http://www.mail-archive.com/telecom-cities@forums.nyu.edu/maillist.xml
