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Using Cell Devices To Monitor Traffic Flow 115

Posted by Hemos from the honk-honk-beep-beep-CRASH dept.
MxTxL writes "MSNBC is running a fairly nifty story here about how a few telco companies are thinking of using cell phone, pager and GPS signals and even the toll-payer transponders to analyze traffic patterns and give operators better abilities to route traffic around congestion. The article even mentions a few privacy issues and talks a little bit on how the GPS units in cars could be alerted to warn the driver about upcoming congestion and suggest an alternative route. "
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Using Cell Devices To Monitor Traffic Flow More

Using Cell Devices To Monitor Traffic Flow

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  • With all these techical words.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    > MxTxL writes: "MSNBC is running a fairly nifty story here about how a few telco companies are thinking of using cell phone, pager and GPS signals and even the toll-payer transponders to analyze traffic patterns and give operators better abilities to route traffic around congestion. The article even mentions a few privacy issues and talks a little bit on how the GPS units in cars could be alerted to warn the driver about upcoming congestion and suggest an alternative route. "

    ...who didn't at first think this was about IP-traffic?

  • Re:Can they track you if the phone is off? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yes.

    They can also track you if the battery is disconnected from the phone.

    The only way to make your phone untracable is to wrap it six times in lead foil.

    You keep a piece of black electrical tape over the lights on your cable modem, don't you? [vancouver-webpages.com]

  • Can they track you if the phone is off? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    can they?
  • Yes, zero tolerance in issuing tickets, but the ability to appeal them. If you get pulled over by a real cop for speeding, no matter when, he can give you a ticket. You can claim you did it to get out or whatever, but you can always get out.

    Basically, you did speed and you should get a ticket. But you should have a quick way to appeal the ticket, whether an electronic thing is in place or not. But that is a seperate issue.

    Electronic and automatic issuance of tickets is the way to go.

  • Electronic toll boxes in Illinois are specifically banned from using toll payment times to track down speeders. Otherwise no one would use them, and it was apparently more important to ease congestion by cutting down on tollway backups than it was to catch speeders.

  • for goatse-wary slashppl

    OK, I've wondered long enough, and now I'm going to ask: can't people just mouse over the link to verify its contents before clicking? I've been fooled into clicking that link exactly once, and never again.

    I refuse to spell out [slashdot.org] any links - the goat sex-weary will just have to avoid my posts :)

  • Interesting commentary on whether the speed laws are broken if 90% of people are speeding.

    I'd guess it'd depend on how you defined speeding. Is going 35 in a 30 zone speeding, or just people trying to stay close to an otherwise inaccurate speedo (my '99 Honda Accord V6 is at least 5MPH slower than indicated)?

    Maybe the idea is to post speed limits, but don't enforce them with tickets, enforce them with jail fines if you cause an accident linked to speeding.

  • *bzzt* Wrong Answer, but thanks for playing. The FCC mandates for Enhanced 911 (E911) will take affect in October of this year (although many operators will likely get a waiver). These mandates require that a certain percentage of EMERGENCY calls can be pinpointed to within a certain distance. The operator has a choice as to the type of technology they deploy. One possibility is A-GPS (Network Assisted GPS), but there are also network based methods that do not require a GPS receiver in the phone. These include Enhanced Cell ID, E-OTD and various other techniques.

    I suggest you do a little research before you start talking about areas you really aren't familiar with.

    Disclaimer: I work for Ericsson's Mobile Positioning Group.

    ---
  • Then why are speed limits still kept artificially low. Interstate highways were designed for safe driving at 75 mph. Do you know any areas where the speed limit is such?

    US states with a rural interstate speed limit of 75 mph:

    • Arizona
    • Colorado
    • Idaho
    • Montana (yes Virginia, Montana has a speed limit)
    • Nebraska
    • Nevada
    • New Mexico
    • Oklahoma
    • South Dakota
    • Wyoming

    US states with a rural interstate speed limit of 70 mph:

    • Alabama
    • Arkansas
    • California
    • Florida
    • Georgia
    • Kansas
    • Louisiana
    • Michigan
    • Minnesota
    • Mississippi
    • Missouri
    • North Carolina
    • North Dakota
    • South Carolina
    • Tennessee
    • Texas
    • Washington
    • West Virginia

    Speed limits in urban areas tend to be lower, due to heavier traffic and more frequent lane changes.

    (Data is from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety - Highway Loss Data Institute [hwysafety.org], and claims to be current as of June 2001.)



    --
  • They do something similar in Houston. Many of the roads (not just the toll roads) have the toll transponders. They clock some number of cars going along each segment, and there's a nice web interface to tell you how fast an entire route is: How it works [tamu.edu].

    This is already pretty Orwellian, but the one comfort about this system is there's an easy way to opt-out: don't keep a toll transponder in your car. While I'll mostly agree that turning off your cell phone/pager constitutes an opt-out system for the scheme mentioned in the article, it's quite an imposition: having a cell phone on, in the car (even a passenger) is asking to be tracked.

  • There is always turning it off until you absolutely need it and then turning it on long enough to talk. My phone is off when driving anyway. I don't need the distraction.
  • read about this 6 months ago!

    here [mercurycenter.com]

    http://www0.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/indept h/ docs/traf012100.htm
    for goatse-wary slashppl
  • Sounds good. Avoid the speeding ticket and hit someone due to wreckless driving habits. I hope you check whose following you before you do that.
  • It wouldn't be an issue if these sorts of tools were not so often abused by the people in positions to abuse them

  • The governor of New York just signed a law prohibiting use of drivers using cellphones except for emergencies. The sample size in New York just went to zero (not to mention the risks of using signal tracking as probable cause to stop you).

    This technology is good at the moment, but what happens when it's obsolete, just like the '80's technology that's so outmoded today? At some point, cellphone technology may change drastically which would render all the maps obsolete within a few years. For instance, the frequencies of digital probably behave differently than analog, and analog phones are a dying breed.
  • I use gps all the time in a car, plane, boat, hell wherever I go. It works great, and I get a lock on plenty of gps birds. Any recent 12-chan gps receiver will do fine, especially if you use an external antenna.

    Since SA was turned off by the clinton admin, I get 20-30 foot resolution all the time with a great DOP.
  • Cool...then all you need is cell-signal-tracking artillery/smart bombs. =)
  • I don't think you'd have to worry about getting a speeding ticket this way. How are they going to prove that you weren't riding with your buddy? Or on a bus/train? Your phone may be able to reveal where you are or how fast you're going, but it can't tell anyone the method.
  • Don't go giving out alternate routes! I like it when everyone ELSE is stuck on the freeway... it means there's no one in my way while I zip down the sidestreets...
  • In a previous life I worked for an independent environmental impact study company whose primary focus was/is traffic analysis.

    Nutshell: Somebody wants to develop/build/install something in someones neighborhood. One part of the process is to justify to agencies with jurisdiction over their permit(s) and other interested parties such as adjacent businesses, municipalities, neighborhood groups, etc. that their development wont screw up their commute/get their schoolchildren run over/cut off reasonable access to their burger joint, and if it does, what will it take to mitigate those factors to an agreeable level.

    So, they hire somebody like the company for which I worked to tell them the story about what traffic (most likely/more accurately motor vehicle traffic) was like awhile ago, what it is like now, and what it will be like down the road, so to speak. There are standard indices of road conditions. This includes the physical condition of the road, roadway Level Of Service, (graded from A to F, meaning approximately what you think it would), speeds, what kind of parking is available, delays due to congestion, and crash rates. The effort was to get a grip on an objective way of representing the quality of travel, not just stats/spin/lies. I personally found it to be a rather interesting field of study, when you consider time/quantity effects of traffic and the fluid nature of said same. In fact, an expert in the field once said (rather poetically for an engineer), traffic flows like water. Maybe he was a plumber, too.

    Anyway, my small part in the picture was site survey and analysis. Site survey data is gathered by a variety of means, some of which are:

    Historical analysis
    Rip from other peoples prior work. Sometimes survey data for less studied areas was a decade out of date with only one or two samples, making trend analyses more sketchy.

    Automatic gathering devices
    This includes those rubber snakes on the road. By the way, those measure speed as well as volume (in answer to the people concerned it might give away their favorite spots to speed: they already know), and can determine axle separation so semis are tallied more accurately. Your states DOT often owns those.

    Organic gathering devices
    Surveyors would sit in a car and actually count vehicles, inventory the intersection entrance/egress paths, time usable merge gaps, and more. This led to several interesting encounters with law enforcement personnel when I tried to explain what a SWM was doing, alone in a vehicle near a grade school.

    This information would prove valuable to businesses and municipalities, if those entities choose to/have the power to act upon the information. Close to real-time, continuously updated data sets, from arterials to back streets. Prevent the design of severe congestion by having better information. I realize this sidesteps the issues raised by the anti-gattaca crowd, but this data waiting to be harvested has the potential of improving the quality of life for many people.

    How much of your life would you get back if you shaved 15 minutes off your commute, each way, for the next 20 years? If you work a standard week, it would save you over 104 continuous days of sitting in traffic. Multiply that out over a populace and see why this might be a good thing.

  • I just picked a Volvo up in Sweden. The Volvo has an integrated GPS/Navigation system in it. I purchased a map of Germany, and was pleased to find that the software on the GPS system dtects signals broadcast by traffic FM radio stations. The FM radio stations indicate where traffic congestion is, and the readout got put up on the GPS map! Granted ther weren't using cell phones to track the traffic... but I thought it was wicked cool to be able to route around a traffic jam on the way to Frankfurt from Munich... without having to speak a word of German. :) - matthewk (MSK2)
  • Would they think that their equipment was broken when they saw 10 second 1/4 mile passes?
  • The German system uses a network of devices mounted along the road (mostly bridges) to measure the traffic-flow. Its anonymous. Early systems used SMS Messages received by a GSM-phone to alert users of this system about traffic jams, but nowadays this info is transmitted by FM radio stations.
  • And what if you were just the passenger in the speeding car and not the driver!
  • http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Wireless/News_Releases/ 1999/nrwl9046.html

    Slashdot broke the link you supplied (note space in the middle). The correct link is
    http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Wireless/News_Releases/ 1999/nrwl9046.html [fcc.gov].

  • If we agree that traffic laws should be enforced, shouldn't it be done in the most efficient way possible? If enforcement is done automatically

    Hmm... so the next time you find yourself needing to speed so that you get out of the way of the truck that didn't see you as it started to turn into where you were, you'll gladly pay the $100 fine for exceeding the speed limit by jumping out in front of the truck.

    (And to make this more fun, let's assume that you couldn't stop since you were right next to the cab of the truck and just too low to the ground to be seen, so your only option was to floor it and boost ahead into the open road, since there was no one in front of you.)

    I'm glad you realize that all laws should be enforced to the letter, by the letter every single time, regardless of circumstance. Yes, zero-tollerance is the way to go!

    But anyway, that's the reason I oppose this - there are plenty of legitimate reasons to speed, and such a solution would ignore any reason.

    --

  • My nokia cell has an doohicky (don't ask me, I'm only a half nerd ;)) on it that officially is mainly used to play multi-player cellphone based games (really basic stuff like snake). It can be easily hacked to detect when your car is going through a RADAR speed check so you can slam on the breaks and avoid the fine. Thats the only thing I'll be using my cell in traffic for :))
  • all the damn roads are conjested.

    also, get the damn hippies ["...soon his monitor reveals two bearded men in the breakdown lane struggling to fix a pickup truck's flat tire."] with krappy tires OFF THE ROAD
  • This reminds me of a story an engineering friend was telling the other night. Apparently, cell phone transmissions can be used to track stealth aircraft as the technology reflects signals in that range. The Serbs built a rough radar unit that can see these reflections. I suppose militaries could potentially equip their soldiers with cell phones holding an open line and render all that great stealth technology useless.

    The Herald [theherald.co.uk] covered the story.

  • I somehow doubt there will be a "You are traffic. Take a bike or carpool." message.
  • I'm getting ready to add a few more pics to the site in about 30 seconds... best part is that it run linux. I'm going to open the code for it on sourceforge when I get it cleaned up a bit. the touchscreen interface uses TCL/TK right now, but i may move to something else when I get some time. Now if only I could upload my order to Wendy's, and debit my account, before I pull up at the window...

    I'd be happy...!



  • Hhmmm, and all I could think of using my GPS for was to upload my cars coordinates every minute so I can find it if it ever gets stolen.

    Check it out at the link below:


  • Here in the San Francisco / Peninsula / Bay Area, for example, there are several main commuting routes like hwy 101, 280, 880, 680, not to mention the three main bridges. (Bay Bridge, San Mateo, and Dumbarton). Once you're on one of these routes, it's virtually impossible to re-configure your route without adding another hour or so to your commute.

    I mean, if I were on the Dumbarton Bridge, zipping along at 50 mph, and I get the "10-car pileup ahead, traffic dead stop" message, what are my options?

    IMHO the best option is just to kick back and relax to your favorite CD or radio station. Listen to a good audiobook. The time is already burned on the commute, best to just use it for entertainment.

    Benbox

  • This is based on the assumption that traffic laws are bad, we should not have to follow them, and the police who are trying to enforce them are enemies to be avoided.

    I disagree. Traffic laws exist to protect the safety of others. I'd be the first to agree that speed limits are way too conservative in some places, but I'm glad there is a limit. The public built its roads by popular consensus; it's not infringing on anyone's "rights" to set traffic laws; the people who invested in those roads have agreed to establish certain guidelines as to their use.

    Speeding tickets suck. But you don't have a right to speed unless you own the road. If we agree that traffic laws should be enforced, shouldn't it be done in the most efficient way possible? If enforcement is done automatically, maybe traffic cops could do something more useful, like patrolling dangerous neighborhoods or improving the response time for emergencies. Once I needed help from a cop, and she was too busy setting up a speed trap to listen.

    -John
  • I'd guess it'd depend on how you defined speeding. Is going 35 in a 30 zone speeding...?

    There was (is) an interesting anti-speeding advertisement on TV here in the UK. They show a car travelling in an urban street at 35 mph, which suddenly slams on the brakes...The voice-over indicates where the car would have stopped, had it been observing the 30mph limit. The cars slides on...and on...and hits a child more than 20 feet beyond the 30 mph stop point.

    The point being, most drivers don't appreciate stopping distances fully, and aren't capable of choosing a safe speed for the road and conditions.

  • If the UK has Infrared sensors at regular intervals tracking license plate numbers for traffic speed sensing, why don't they send you a ticket for every time you exceed the speed limit? Or just zap you with some kind of bolt to disable you then and there. I guess there are worse things than being stuck in a traffic jam.

    If time travel is possible, why haven't we been overrun by toursits from the future? - Stephen Hawking
  • In the UK, I believe they already have CCTV cameras on major motorways to read people's license plates, track their average speed and issue electronic tickets automatically.

    We have this in Oregon now. It's only allowed in 2 cities (sort of a pilot project that's been going on for 6 or 7 years). The things aren't permament, they're just vans that they park on the side of the road with a regular radar gun connected to a camera. The cop sets the speed (usually 5-10 MPH over the limit) and it takes pictures and mails out tickets if the speed it captures is over it's limit. There are ways of appealing.

    They also just started using red-light cameras, where they put cameras on the poles holding up traffic lights. If you run the red, it takes your picture.

    And now for something completely different... my friends from South Africa say they call Traffic lights 'robots' there.

  • Well, there is a related thing that doesn't have the privacy stuff, doesn't have people trying to read their cell phones while driving, and helps to clear up traffic. It's called NextBus [nextbus.com] (www.nextbus.com for the paranoid).

    Basically, GPS transmitters on buses and trains to give you positions and time until arrivals via the web, your cell phone, pagers, etc. I know that Tri-Met [tri-met.org] is going to be using it for the new Portland Steetcar [portlandstreetcar.org].

  • Most of the ideas for GPS in phones that I have seen require you to be in a call for the GPS to turn on. If the GPS is on all the time the phone you will have to recharge your phone a lot more often that you do now. So it would be pretty difficult to track cars usefully this way.
  • Not true. When your cell phone is on and broadcasting, there is a thing called multipath in which your signal bounces off of trees and buildings and such on its way to the cell antenna. Normally, that's a problem. But the best way to track users to satisfy the e911 requirement is to plot the multipath on every street, using in the guy who presented this at a conference I attended--college kids in wired up vans driving up and down every street in every city. So when you fire up your cell in a city that has been mapped, your position is tracked quite well. here is a pretty cool set of links about it. a patent story [wirelessnewsfactor.com] and the main culprits/innovators, US Wireless [uswcorp.com] and their product [uswcorp.com], including some demo links. Oh, I just revisted the site, and it appears that the demo they had of a car driving around on the freeway in Oakland isn't there anymore. Too bad, it was scary.
  • Cool...then all you need is cell-signal-tracking artillery/smart bombs. =)

    Bet a dollar they already exst.

  • >>While telecom companies are barred from disclosing someone's identity without consent, Dempsey notes that up-starts like U.S. Wireless technically aren't telecom carriers, and so they aren't covered by such restrictions. The Cellular Communications Industry Association, a Washington, DC-based trade organization, recently proposed that the FCC develop privacy guidelines that include a provision for notifying customers of how their cell signals might be used.>>

    What's up with that?

  • You know, you just know this is going to happen:

    Man driving to work.

    Car - "take next left!"

    Man - "What? Stupid car, that's the wrong direction! It would take way longer that way."

    45 minutes later, man explaining to boss why he's late:

    Man - "Well, you see, my car kept giving me these bad directions, so I said 'enough is enough' and took over. But then I got into this big traffic jam! Stupid traffic. Stupid car."

    Hahaha

  • We have them here in limited quantities but every time they turn them on it causes MORE traffic because all of the idio^h^h^h^h other drivers have to slow down to read them.

    A few months ago they put a test pattern up on one of them and you wouldn't believe the wall of brake lights that greeted you as you approached. "It just says TEST-TEST-TEST-TEST you illiterate [bleep]s!"

    A nice idea, the message signs, but ultimately too difficult for most drivers.

    On a related note, I'm lobbying for the Department of Transportation to give people photos of tow trucks along with their drivers licenses...apparently most of my fellow motorists have never seen one.

    [/rant]

    -Coach-

  • It's better than the 15% who currently "obey" the law, and area actually the dumbest of all, because impeding the flow of traffic causes more accidents than speeding does.

    Speeding doesn't tend to cause accidents anyway. Studies surrounding the institution and repeal of the double-nickel have proved that increasing speed reduces accident frequency. But it increases the fatality rate, absolutely and per-accident.

    I assume you have a URL for a study that we can all peruse :)
    Or am I expecting too much from a slashdot reader.

  • The only reason your air bags are so deadly is because you don't have legislation saying that you need to wear seat belts. This means that air bags need to blow out much faster then normal to stop your skull turning into mush.

    But of course, since both mandatory air bags and mandatory seat belts are repressing your rights, I am sure my hard earned tax dollars will no doubt one day be spent trying to push your brain back into your skull after you crash into an SUV while talking on the mobile phone and shooting a gun at something.

    Thx bye.

  • The question is, if 90% of us are "breaking" the law, are we wrong or is the law? And why don't we raise the speed limits a few mph so only 15% of us are breaking the law*?

    Do you honestly think that 85% of drivers out there are capable of correctly gauging the speed at which a road is 'safe'? Or is it more likely that they all drive as fast as they can, simply because 'everyone else is doing it'.

    The reason why we have laws like this is that people are fundamentally 'really really dumb'.

    Sorry.

  • Hmmm...

    Using the sub signal from an FM radio allows you to get a radio signal from any passing car hearing radio (97% of population in a car 8)

    => Easier, less costly, no need for Open standards.

    You could even use it to know what station people are hearing ...

    8|
    No, don't Tell my friend I hear Polka FM

  • ..."Information Superhighway"

    Hey, it's a highway with a ton of information on it. Better go over to one with more free bandwidth...
  • that inform you of problems ahead. They'll suggest alternative routes. Here's [tamu.edu] how our system works.

    Houston's Real Time Traffic Map [tamu.edu] puts [!] on the map wherever an incident has occurred. It opens up a pop-up window with info on traffic issues. Currently there's a "Car-B-Q" (car on fire) on 59 that's blocking a lane. You can also view the traffic via the highway camera's [tamu.edu]

  • We've had them for a while, so it's not distracting.
  • So, even though it's anonymized, it's more than sufficient for a police officer to go out and clock someone speeding. Even though the speed data isn't used to directly issue the ticket (unlike a certain car rental company), it still provides critical information that leads to the ticket being issued. So it still could be used as a sort of defacto Big Brother system.
    It's still an indirect measurement. Not much different from a cop driving a road in an unmarked car and noticing how fast the flow is going. Or someone who lives along the road complaining to the township supervisor about how fast everyone drives past their house.

    I seriously doubt any local police departments are going to suddenly "discover" that a long, flat, straight road in their jurisdiction is frequently driven at (speed_limit + 20) MPH. As long as the device used in tracking remains anonymous, the results will be academic.

    We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
  • Good Greif, people!

    "GPS" is a system whereby a radio *reciever (Repeat, it is a RECIEVER, not a transmitter) can decipher one-way transmissions from orbiting satelites in order to allow it to calculate it's position.

    Each satelite (And by satelite i mean a big chunk of equipment up in the sky) constantly broadcasts it's position in the sky and the current atomic time. The GPS unit uses this data to perform some math, allowing it to figure out where it is in relation to the satelites.

    NONE of this, alone, allows anyone, anywhere, to figure out where you are.

    The Acme rental cars are equipped with both a GPS reciever and a tracking device. It's possible for a tracking device to transmit it's GPS coordinates, but not necesary. It does make things easier, admitedly.

    Without the tracking device, a car rental company could just as easily use the logs from the navigation system to figure out how fast you were driving. No tracking device needed. It is incredibly poor customer relations, however, and i think hartford will soon have one less car rental agency.

    I haven't read the FCC thing, but i sorta doubt that cell phones will be equipped with full blown GPS recievers. Equipping them with enough brains to allow them to triangulate their position relative to the nearest cell stations would be far easier. you don't need GPS for this, but if it can be tweaked to emit WGS-84 coordinates, it sure will make you easier to find by anyone with a GPS reciever.

    Basically, you'd need to know the coordinates of the cell stations. I think most cell phones already know how far they are from each passing cell station, just a little more math and a little added software.

    I think the political importance of outrage over this sort of thing is hugely disserviced by the ammount of idiotic uninformed ranting going on. Get your facts straight or shut up.

  • Correction, they really only transmit atomic time, and other gobbletygook, making them simpler than i'd thought. www.trimble.com has a pretty good explanation of how GPS works.

  • I heard that Motorola was looking at this kind of service back in the early '90s. And I never heard any more about it. Wonder whether they discovered something that made further development not worth pursuing. Wonder whether these companies will rediscover the same thing. On the other hand, these people pushing this now might be former Motorola employees who decided to take the idea and run with it after their former, short-sighted employer dropped it. Wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened.
    --

  • Geez traffic looks rather light [cnn.com] in New York today.

    -cpd
  • >Electronic toll boxes in Illinois are specifically banned from using toll payment times to track down speeders. Otherwise no one would use them, and it was apparently more important to ease congestion by cutting down on tollway backups than it was to catch speeders.

    No, that is to prevent the state from having to jail every man, woman and child in Chicago. For the ones who haven't been there, the speed limit is 55mph or less and the average speed is 85mph on 355, 78mph on the Tri-state and speed of light on 88 and 90.
    Not that people drive slower on the other,non-toll expressways.

  • Ever so much as USED GPS in a car? It cuts out all the time, especially in large cities and depending on where you are geographically (never mind the quality of the equipment you're using). I've done a few experiments, and it sometimes takes quite awhile for the GPS unit to start up and get a lock - and maintaining a signal on 3 or more satellites is difficult. GPS isn't all that accurate either!

    And this isn't getting into what someone who wanted to fsck with the system could do. Civilian, consumer level, ground-based GPS is not as robust as you might think.

  • My first thought was that most people living in the projects of your nearby large-city wouldn't have such snazzy GPS systems. Thus, everytime you wanted to take the interstate into downtown, the computer/cellphone/whatever would beep and tell you to take Martin Luther King Blvd under the bridge because it'd think there were fewer cars down that way.

    That reminds me about the wonderful directions MapQuest once gave me that took me to the middle of the projects in Atlanta, when I wanted to get to Emory University. Trying to get out of the projects in an unfamiliar city at 4am with 3 geeks in a pretty green saturn isn't exactly my idea of fun (well, it's funny now, but wasn't while it was happening! :)
  • *sigh*... instead of highlighting the real interesting issue they focuussed into the glitzy geek angle to this story. What should have been the big issue in this story is that ALL cell phones made after sometime later this year must have GPS tracking support. As stated, this is so 911 can more easily track calls and save lives. However, these intrusions can easily get out of control without proper limitations.

    You might also be a bit concerned to know that many (test system) cars already have on board tracking devices that track what type of driver you are, how often you drive, average length of a trip, mileage, miles/km per hour that you drive. It's only a matter of time and legislation before everything is in place so you can't break traffic laws.
  • They were tracking you full time before, but only at a cel-granular level. How do you think the call gets to your phone? If you leave it on for roaming, it's fairly straight forward for a hacker to track you as you be-bop around the city. With the 911 stuff, it's simply possible to say you're in Joe's House of Live Goat Porn rather than you're just in the crack whore district of the city.
  • old style pagers I belive was more of just a general broadcast. This includes alphanumeric pagers as well as plain old numeric ones. If the pager can broadcast a return message, it could be used for tracking. I don't know if they're used that way or not though. I would expect them to use a modified cellular telephone protocol but I haven't looked into that technology all that much.
  • I should first say that I'm totally in favor of this and think it's a really cool idea.

    However, I can already hear the privacy advocates screaming "big brother". People freaked out about serial numbers embedded in processors, after all -- can you really imagine that nobody's going to complain about companies implementing technology to track them wherever they go?

    I hope not, but this just seems like exactly the sort of thing privacy nuts latch on to.
  • There's a small red button at the top right of most model Nokia and Motorola phones that allows you to opt out of being tracked while you drive. Theres' no way you can be tracked, or issued a speeding ticket based on that data if you use it!

    Just place your cell phone on the passenger seat and press the red button that says 'Power'.
    ---------------------------------------- ----------
  • this information would help operators "route" traffic around trouble spots. If an accident happens on a suburban street, it's possible. About a week ago we had a tar truck overturn on the D.C. beltway that completely closed all lanes in one direction. Where the hell are they going to send all of that traffic? Last I checked there wasn't a whole lot of unused 5 line highways in the area. Hell, during rush hour every flat surface is choked with cars. In addition, the idea that a message on a sign board is going to keep traffic flowing (left lane closed ahead) is laughable. Anyone who's driven in an urban area lately that the simple act of a cop pulling someone over for a ticket can and will cause a traffic jam.
  • We already have real time traffic data in many cities - example San Diego [ca.gov].

    Granted, this will supply more data, but I can't see how its going to help congestion much. It's just going to provide more proof that you can't get from point a to point b during rush hour.

  • Geez traffic looks rather light in New York today.

    And if you RTFA, you would realize that it's not a total ban on cell phone use while driving in NYS... it's just a ban on handheld cell phone use while driving. Get a hands free kit or a single ear headset with a boom microphone, and *poof*, you're legal again.

    What you really want to be right now is be the person selling hands free cell phone kits in New York :-)

    And, I saw the funniest thing today... as I was in a car going down the interstate, I saw an SUV next to me, with a damaged front left end... in the driver's seat, a lady with a big ol' cast on her hand... and a cell phone held up to her ear... I wonder if those three things are somehow interrelated....

  • In the UK, I believe they already have CCTV cameras on major motorways to read people's license plates, track their average speed and issue electronic tickets automatically.
    Yes, this has been in operation in Nottingham along the ring road (just a dual carriageway, not a major motorway) for quite a few months, at least on a trial basis if not now fully operational.

    Amusing possibilities for abuse involve getting a couple of mates to draw the registration number of someone you don't like on pieces of paper, and arrange to flash them at the cameras at either end of the monitored stretch within seconds of each other.

    Cue automated speeding ticket for travelling in excess of Mach 4 :-) Would obviously be repealed, but I don't know if anyone's actually tried to get a ticket issued like that to see if the system is so obviously fallable.
  • The difference is this:

    When I'm in a cell, I'm within a broad area. If they want me, they have to triangulate to get me.

    If I have a cell phone with e911 imposed on it, the GPS will pinpoint my location much more accurately.

    I'm already considering abandoning the phone. I wish those inkjet-printed paper phones would hurry up and get here.

    A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
  • Do you know if this sort of tracking is being implemented with pagers?
    Old-style pagers, new-style two way pagers?
    I'd think about getting a pager module for my handspring if I thought it would keep me from being tracked, or keep me tracked only at a cell-granular level rather than a specific level.

    A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
  • I meant to add this URL also.

    http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Wireless/News_Release s/ 1999/nrwl9040.html

    A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
  • Cell Phone : peep, peep

    Driver (picks up cell phone and tries to deciffer message on tiny display)

    Car: CCRRRRRRAAAAASSSSHHHHHHHH!!!

    There's a traffic congestion 300 meters in front of you, thank you for using AT&T

  • It's called GSM and is used by 600'000'000 (give or take a couple 100 million) subscribers, throughout the world.

    Works like a charm, too...

  • If we agree that traffic laws should be enforced, shouldn't it be done in the most efficient way possible?

    However, a founding principle of our country is that sometimes personal liberty and rights take precedence over enforcement of the law. Some otherwise open-and-shut criminal convictions for much more serious offenses have been overturned as part of a system that attempts (and sometimes fails) to maximize the protection of both the accused and the victims.

  • Ok, I live 38 miles from work, follow traffic reports on the radio (given every 10 minutes) and know a few alternate routes in the event something bad happens, 50% of the time the upcoming congestion doesn't materialize. When it does it's usually so bad and that many others know the alt routes that they're jammed up, too.

    That telcos are considering pitching in and helping civil engineers (sorry, had to contain a laugh at the thought of PACBELL trying to assist the Cal DMV) may seem nobel, but these engineers know about these problems, have known about these problems for years. Doing anything about them is nearly the impossible. When it does change, traffic patterns usally change sooner and the problem has moved on to a new venue. Probably good info if anyone is considering updating the Sims with it tho.

    Where's that flying car, eh?

    Best Plan: go find a park or a bar and camp out for a while, if you're on your way to work then blame it on traffic!

    --
    All your .sig are belong to us!

  • "give operators better abilities to route traffic around congestion." That's a lie. It's going to be sold to marketing agencies for better billboard placement/pricing. Like Nelson ratings but what rode the commuters are using rather than what channel the viewers are watching.

  • Actually, over here in Europe the trucks have a manadatory tour-recording device which tracks the speed of the truck. This record can be used to prove that the driver was speeding, even though it's main use is to track the mandatory rests of the driver.

    On top of this there exist systems which track the behaviour of the driver and rate his/her performance (I'm not going to advertise further as I work for a company which provides such solutions). It is of course a very small step from this to linking the GPS information and automatically deducting the speeding tickets from the driver's paycheck.

    And yes, the automatic camera systems are in use at least in Finland and elsewhere in Europe, the law does however require that the driver is identified from the picture so it is not too difficult to fool that system if you want to.

  • This is the first and foremost reason why we need open standards on things like cell phones. If the companies that built these little gadgets that are supposed to do so much allowed the consumers to have their own personal say in what they WANT them to do, each person could define their service based on their needs, and could even program the devices (or hire the local geek) to do it their way.
  • I watched a show a few months ago about technology and how it relates to new cars and auto development and the like. There was a quick discussion of Tokyo's (I think) traffic monitoring system:

    Basically there are hundreds (thousands?) of cameras around Tokyo that all feed to a central monitoring office. That office is staffed by several people whose whole job is to watch the TV's and update their systems on where congestion is occurring. These "systems" then send the data to cell towers/satellites for transmission to all "wired" cars. The drivers of these cars can pull up traffic reports instantly; recalculate their route based on baselines of traffic-flow, speed limits and traffic lights on other possible routes; and get instant ETA's based on any of those recommended alt routes.

    Obviously the system is interactive with GPS and even cell signal triangulation in order to get these route updates.

    Yummy Japan.
  • Okay, now that's either paranoia or ignorance.

    They're already "tracking" you. Your phone (when on) reports to the system where it is. The system tracks your phone's ID through the various cells. If they didn't, they'd have to broadcast an incoming call request to every cell on the system in order to get it through to you.

    What this is suggesting, it seems, is using information about the rate at which IDs move from cell to cell in order to describe traffic patterns. Seems like a useful application of existing collateral information.

  • Police already know how many people are speeding: over 90%.

    They also know how many people they can stop for speeding and make it pay for the time and effort: 15%.

    So they set their radar guns for the speed at which the top 15% of cars will be going, and wait.

    No need for tracking technology there. Just put a cop out in traffic and he'll find someone to nail within minutes. He wouldn't even need a radar gun. Most speeders are oblivious to what's going on behind them anyway. The gun just reduces the mean-time-to-collar, increasing the gross margin on the operation.

    The question is, if 90% of us are "breaking" the law, are we wrong or is the law? And why don't we raise the speed limits a few mph so only 15% of us are breaking the law*?

    --Blair

    * - in some states, the standard for setting a speed limit on a street is to estimate the 85-percentile speed. But those estimates are based on old evidence, and somewhat derated due to revenue-generating motives.
  • 1. That advertisement has a very chilling lesson for us all:

    Teach kids to stay out of the street.

    If your kids are too small to learn or too stupid to obey, where the fuck are you and what are you doing that they can get into the street?

    2. Speed is situational. If you're in a place where there are kids playing in or near the street, or where your view is obstructed and there might be kids there, then 30 mph is a good 10-30 mph higher than a prudent driver will drive anyway.

    3. A car doing 30 brakes to a stop 3 feet farther than a car doing 29. You could save a kid by lowering the speed in that ad to 29 mph. A car doing 29 brakes to a stop 2.9 feet farther than a car doing 28. You could save a kid by lowering the speed in that new ad to 28 mph. A car doing 28 brakes to a stop 2.8 feet farther than a car doing 27 mph. You could save a kid by lowering the speed in that new ad to 27. A car ... by lowering the speed in that new ad to 0 mph. No more children will die in traffic mishaps due to speed. Problem solved.

    4. In the U.S., residential zones almost universally limit speed to 25. In some places that's an "absolute maximum speed limit" regardless of whether it's posted or not (see speed is situational above). Who are these limeys who are so hateful of children that they would add 5 mph to the reasonable and prudent speed in their neighborhoods?

    --Blair
    "Cavitate cheek. Insert tongue as necessary."
  • It's better than the 15% who currently "obey" the law, and area actually the dumbest of all, because impeding the flow of traffic causes more accidents than speeding does.

    Speeding doesn't tend to cause accidents anyway. Studies surrounding the institution and repeal of the double-nickel have proved that increasing speed reduces accident frequency. But it increases the fatality rate, absolutely and per-accident.

    That's why you don't get to go 95 on the freeway. Not because you'll cause an accident, but because you're likely to be dead if you cause almost any accident at all. And if you're dead, you can't push your car to the side of the road, and it stops traffic for hours, and ties up homicide detectives and the coroner and the Accident Scene Sanitation Service and all sorts of NHTSA employees. Better you should live a cripple and keep the full legal responsibility for the paperwork to yourself.

    > Sorry.

    And naive.

    --Blair
  • I assume you have a URL for a study that we can all peruse :) Or am I expecting too much from a slashdot reader.

    You want google [google.com], you know where to find it.

    I got the info in traffic school. I typically get nailed by this overweaning legislation once every 30 months or so. Just the right frequency to qualify to pay the hundred-dollar extortion for whatever info they consider current that year, to keep the points off my license and avoid the arbitrary $500 increase in the illegal tax they call "mandatory insurance".

    Until next time, I'm sticking to "Studies show that speeding doesn't cause accidents, it increases the fatality rate from a lower number of accidents."

    --Blair
  • On city highways around Pittsburgh, PA (and probably elsewhere), I've seen what I'm told are traffic density radar units. Little polls with solar cells on them and white boxes. I could be wrong, but this is where our various local new services get their traffic report data. Why not just sign on a deal with cities already providing this service rather than invading our privacy?
  • Congress has already mandated airbags in cars. They costs thousands of dollars and kill more kids than school shootings [freerepublic.com]. Congress has also mandated sophisticated oxygen and CO2 sensors be hooked up to your "engine warning light", and go off if your gascap is left loose.

    If we can mandate all that, why can't we mandate what I will call "the transponder box". Imagine a burst-mode cell phone and GPS all wrapped up in an embedded black box and mass produced for every car in the country. Think of the traffic solutions we could impose:

    - Instant end to speeding and aggressive lane changing. Every time you broke the speed limit you would be billed on a formula, such as (mph over * seconds over). Every time you made an agressive lane change (the system would know where the other cars were, to check your proximity) you would be fined and points assessed to your license.
    We could even fine people for not zipper merging!

    Today's sprawling traffic jams would be eliminated overnight. Anyone who has seen the results of traffic simulations by the NHRA knows that speeding and agressive lane changing combined with not leaving enough distance is the root cause of bumper to bumper traffic jams.

    I'm not talking about an invasion of privacy - throw away everything but a meaningless box id # that only the state can correlate. I'm talking about an end to traffic deaths and that endless sea of brakelights and predatory drivers you swim through every morning.

    Personally, it makes me drool.
  • Ok but to accomplish this they will have to be tracking you at all times. Right. Its interesting to see peoples reaction to this when its presented in cloaked way behind a story of how it will help society so you aren't late for work or whatever the advantages are.
  • Someone posted the e911 link (www.fcc.gov/e911), what that does to telecom companies is that they will HAVE to be able to locate all of the cell-phone users who use their systems.

    That means they -have- to invest in it (at least in Europe and in the US), so they're going to be coming up with a bunch of new services that use your location, to recoup on that investment.

    So expect big companies to know where you are a lot of the time. You know, so they can serve you better....

    -PYves
  • This is one of those "why didn't I think of that!" ideas. It actually makes a lot of sense. Most radio & tv stations use helicopters, police scanner feeds, traffic cameras, and other sources when giving traffic reports on the air. Some use SmarTraveler [smartraveler.com] if it's applicable to their area. Even SmarTraveler uses those same sources for traffic information.

    The nice thing here is that engineers can use data obtained from GPS to analyze traffic hot spots and design appropriate solutions to them without having to go to the site, set up cameras, observe traffic, etc. when determining the cause of the hot spot.

    In addition, using GPS makes it easy to add traffic monitoring to other locations quickly, again without installing cameras, traffic counters, etc.

    For example, in the '96 Olympics, Atlanta added several hundred cameras around the city's highways and streets to monitor traffic around the games. Shortly, cities that will be hosting the Olympics and other major events can get the GPS data feeds without the need to setup all that equipment.

  • Such a system could also be used to reconstruct an accident for investigators. Especially if parties and witnesses have l%5{pinions of what happened, particularly in cases of road rage and accident fraud (people who fake accidents hoping for big insurance payoffs).

    Data such as the speed of the cars, what lanes they're in, etc, can all be used by accident invetigators to build a formal description of the incident and determine who was actually at fault, and whose insurance rates go up.

  • Re:What About Traffic Density Radar? (Score:3)

    by Keith Russell ( 4440 ) on Tuesday July 10, 2001 @11:34AM (#93914) Journal
    They were put up by Traffic.com. [traffic.com] We were the pilot city for their system. Those sensors poll every 60 seconds, and can tell how dense and how fast the flow is moving (or not moving as you approach the Squirrel Hill Tunnels). They combine this with traditional methods (choppers, watchtowers, cellphone callers) to handle accidents on the main routes, as well as general information on traffic in areas not covered by the flow sensors.

    It's pretty cool. I can now see in realtime just how frelled up the Parkways East and West are, and exactly where the Perpetual I-79 Repaving Project is this week. And it doesn't seem capable to pick out individual vehicles, so it can only detect how fast the flow is going.

    We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
  • Traffic laws should exist for the saftey of all involved. They also should be fairly enforced. However, this is not really the case. Traffic laws (especially speed limits) exist as a way of gathering road use taxes. Too many jurisdictions have come to rely on the revenue generated by traffic fines. The most glaring case being Linndale, OH [cincypost.com], which manages to fund the majority of its village budget with monies from traffic fines imposed on non-residents. Though the problem is particularly severe in Linndale it certianly isn't unique to that area. There are many jurisdictions (New Jersey comes to mind) that found it necessare to sharply increase fines to maintian revenue stream upon raising the speed limit above 55MPH.

    This is quite revealing as to why traffic laws aren't uniformly enforced and why the general public has such contempt for them. Police officers are simply tax collectors and receive an amount of respect communsurate with that position from most motorists.

    ________________________

  • Re:Ummm don't track me thanks (Score:3)

    by firewort ( 180062 ) on Tuesday July 10, 2001 @10:55AM (#93916)
    They'll be tracking us full-time anyway,
    thanks to FCC e911.

    http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Wireless/News_Release s/ 1999/nrwl9046.html

    I'll keep using my pcs phone without e911 capability, until it breaks. When it breaks, screw communicating, I'd rather not be tracked.

    A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close

  • Anonymity != Privacy (Score:3)

    by Erasmus Darwin ( 183180 ) on Tuesday July 10, 2001 @11:04AM (#93917)
    In the article, it refers to the anonymizing the cell phone that the data came from as a means of ensuring privacy. While that make work for something like television viewership (the fact that 500 people in my area watched "Barney" isn't going to reveal my secret purple dinosaur fetish), it doesn't necessarily work for traffic. Imagine the following anonymized traffic data:

    Data for I-95, mile marker 88:
    Average speed -- 70 mph
    Lowest speed -- 46 mph
    Highest speed -- 98 mph

    So, even though it's anonymized, it's more than sufficient for a police officer to go out and clock someone speeding. Even though the speed data isn't used to directly issue the ticket (unlike a certain car rental company), it still provides critical information that leads to the ticket being issued. So it still could be used as a sort of defacto Big Brother system.

  • Welcome to New York. (Score:3)

    by ageitgey ( 216346 ) on Tuesday July 10, 2001 @10:52AM (#93918) Homepage
    ...According to our trafficompu2000 3d system, gridlock is covering the metro area. In certain areas espec-

    DJ: What's a trafficompu2000, Captain Bob?
    Guy in Traffic Copter: Well it uses Cell Phone signals to track traffic -
    DJ: Hey, aren't cell phones in moving vechicles illegal Captain?
    Guy in Traffic Copter: Well, it sends them a ticket at the same time! The mayor has got this city running like a machine. Back to you, Rob.

    ... Stay tuned for more team traffic coverage every six minutes on W-W-W-W-W-FUN AM1240!

    YOU (to friend on phone): Damn!

  • I can see it now. (Score:3)

    by Kujako ( 313468 ) on Tuesday July 10, 2001 @10:38AM (#93919)
    cell : Warning, cell phone using driver in blue BMW swerving in and out of trafic on HY 19. User on HY 19 : Hey, that jerk the phone's talking about is in the same type of car I'm in.

  • Re:The potential for abuse is enormous (Score:3)

    by natesch ( 465385 ) on Tuesday July 10, 2001 @10:58AM (#93920)
    It has already happened. Check out this story [ctnow.com] about a guy who got busted by his rental car agency when they tracked him with a GPS.

  • Dynamic system indeed! (Score:4)

    by dmorin ( 25609 ) <dmorin@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday July 10, 2001 @10:50AM (#93921) Homepage Journal
    Looks like a self-modifying system -- person A uses phone to check traffic status, is told "all clear". Person A then smashes into person B because he wasn't paying attention to the f*cking road. Person C then checks traffic status and is told "Accident ahead." And so on. :)

  • The potential for abuse is enormous (Score:4)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday July 10, 2001 @10:42AM (#93922)
    If people can be tracked in their cars with cell phones and on-board GPS devices, how long until the police uses this to give people speeding tickets ?

    In the UK, I believe they already have CCTV cameras on major motorways to read people's license plates, track their average speed and issue electronic tickets automatically. If people's cell phones are used to achieve this, not only the authorities won't have to spend a penny to catch people anymore, but the people themselves will pay for the cell phone and the service to get shafted !

    Suddenly, I'm glad I drive a 30 year old car without On-Star, GPS or cell phone.

  • Cool art car! (Score:5)

    by griffjon ( 14945 ) <.GriffJon. .at. .gmail.com.> on Tuesday July 10, 2001 @10:41AM (#93923) Homepage Journal
    Bystander: "Cool art car!"

    ClueStick Owner: "Dude, it's not an 'art car' it's a Farraday cage protecting my car from being tracked with a mounted trafficcamera-flashing laser system and highly reflective paint coatings on the license plates to reduce resolution..."

    Bystander: "huh?"

    ClueStick Owner: "Here's a tin foil hat. Have fun."

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