Mobile Phones to Monitor Traffic Congestion

shas3n writes "In an interesting and innovative way Bangalore city, India, has come up with a way to monitor road traffic congestion by monitoring the density of mobile phones. This can give users quantitative and directional information of traffic flow without significant additional infrastructure investments. The congestion data is already available online."

Infinite Loop

Unfortunately, the way they monitor traffic congestion is to send out a bunch of people to go see what the traffic congestion is, thereby adding to the traffic congestion. :)

Houses by the roadside?

They need to be careful because a number of people could live along side the road and the number of people at home will change throughout the day. As these people are not mobile, and the people change during the day, it is difficult to discern stopped traffic from people watching the television.

I'd be interested to see if they have addressed these problems and if so, how.

Privacy

Luckily there are no privacy issues in showing where individual cell phones are!

Cameras?

Strategically placed cameras is probably a better idea.

But why use a simple solution when there's a perfectly good complicated solution to try?

Uhmmm...

...shut up and drive?

Just a thought.

sure beats local news method

GREAT idea. wish the did the same here in nyc. here in ny local news station (1010am) asks people to call in traffic updates which are free if you have a certain carrier. even the mta (metro subway) used surveys a few years back when they first went electronic with the metrocard. dont see why they couldnt log entrance exits and entrances and times.

What took so long?

With so many cars having GPS' factory-installed since 2000 I have wondered myself why this hasn't already been done in the US; thousands of cars uploading position reports and velocities during rushhour would provide much better information than the notoriously unreliable traffic sensors.

Probably issues of payment for the cell phone charges and privacy.

sPh

Great stuff - this is innovation

And for the people who are arguing the bicycles, pedestrians etc would mess with the actual traffic congestion, remember that in bangalore those constitute a great deal of the traffic jam too.

Congestion is predictable

It happens with regularity. If satnav systems simply recorded their average speed and learned how fast they were going they could make more intelligent routing decisions.

 

Great!

For the five of us on /. from Bangalore, we are all set! How about something for S. California, which has some of the worst traffic in the world?

Not only they

Canadian Rogers cable tv/ISP/mobile phone provider is working on the same solution as I understand.

As opposed to what?

Isn't the traffic always congested in Bangalore?

Missing info

How come the map doesn't show all the American call center's and outsourcing firms? This is Bangalore, after all!

Follow the money

Some time ago, it was reported that Bangalore could lose jobs because the software shops were fed up with the congestion there. Infosys opened 1000s of new jobs in other cities (http://bangalorebuzz.blogspot.com/2006/01/infy-to -expand-outside-bangalore.html). Maybe Bangalore decided they'd better pay some attention to the problem.

Again?

How is this different from 1 [slashdot.org], 2 [slashdot.org], 3 [slashdot.org], 4, 5, etc?

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=193732&cid =15887193 [slashdot.org]

Where have I heard this before?

A bit off-topic, but have you heard they're going to be tracking cell-phone 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/article.pl?sid=05/11/19/143247 [slashdot.org]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/19/074524 8 [slashdot.org]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/01/159241 [slashdot.org]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/16/076217 [slashdot.org]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/30/124324 7 [slashdot.org]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/13/042822 9 [slashdot.org]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/10/233725 9 [slashdot.org]

There, that's better. Hopefully, one day they'll come to their senses, and post a story or two on the subject.

Sounds okay.

Sounds like a pretty good idea to me. The phone company _already has_ the data, so if they were to release non identifying information (location, direction, speed) for each unit there are no huge privacy concerns - relative to the benefits. As someone else mentioned bikes could be a problem - not to mention pedestrians and old guys sitting on benches. The sheer number of data points could be a useful pointer to whether it's a traffic jam or a bunch of people walking... Some smarts could likely filter the data into classes of movement.

New ?

Though it hasn't been implemented yet, this was already planned in the UK with TomTom and Vodafone teaming up. The Register has the article: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/10/27/tomtom_cel lular_traffic_tech/ [reghardware.co.uk]

Re:Dupe GOTO 10

yes.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168794&cid =14070720 [slashdot.org]

Re:What about the traditional modes of transport?

If they have cell phones, then yes.