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."

Houses by the roadside?

[DrDevil]

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.

What took so long?

[sphealey]

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

[unity100]

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.

Re:Uhmmm...

[pthor1231]

After all, I have no recollection of mere conversation being considered an undue safety risk in regards to driving.

Neither did that driver have any recollection that a car was in his blind spot, but he found out real quick that it was. Just because you don't remember anything happening doesn't mean that someone else's quick reaction didn't save you.

Re:What took so long?

[arivanov]

1. AFAIK someone in Seattle was looking into this more than 2 years ago. So there is nothing particularly innovative about it.

2. You do not need GPS. In fact you do not want GPS, because this makes the data individually identifiable and you have to prove that you are not doing something nefarious with it. Paging stats and handover stats from cells located near trunk routes will be a perfectly good replacement for this. All you need is to play correlation analysis vs actual traffic stats for a couple of days. You can make them more precise by looking at how the timing advance in GSM or power level in CDMA changes, but this is the same can of worms as GPS. You have to prove that privacy is not affected.