Your cell phone and traffic congestion

By: Drivers.com staff

Date: Sunday, 20. April 2008

Your cell-phone is always tracked. It has to be! If you are moving around as you make a call, the phone system needs to know when you are moving out of range of one cell site and transfer your call (seamlessly, you hope) to the next nearest site.

The capability to track you via your cell phone has been around as long as cell phones themselves, but the technology for gathering the information and turning it to good use is entering a new era. The driving force behind this trend is worsening traffic congestion.

Congestion and the resulting traffic jams are not just frustrating for drivers they are costly. They cause pollution, expensive delays in the movement of goods and people, and high stress. In addition, they�re a nightmare for traffic managers and planners.

One way to reduce or avoid the problem is to guide traffic to alternative routes. However, while traffic information about motorways, expressways and main roadways is often readily available from sources such as sensors and cameras, this has not been true of minor roads that might be used as alternatives. Sometimes your GPS navigation system can get you into worse problems!

Information from cell phones can change that, and is already doing so in parts of Europe where rapidly increasing congestion and complex road systems make navigation and traffic information technologies almost essential.

Thee are basically three options for systematically gathering large scale traffic information, says Tom Bouwer, vice president of sales & marketing at AirSage, a major contender in the burgeoning global traffic information industry: hardware-based solutions such as sensors embedded in the roadway, GPS signaling, and the use of wireless signaling data from commercial cell phone networks such as O2, Vodaphone, and Verizon.

"While all three methods will provide some degree of reliability, only one offers quick delivery, low-cost, high reliability and extensive coverage," says Bouwer. "Wireless signaling data provides real-time speed and travel-time information on both highways and arterials."

Wireless signal extraction technology (AirSage calls it 'WiSE') uses algorithms to extract data from the information broadcast by cell phones and aggregate it into forms that can be used by traffic information systems. In any particular area, the movements of hundreds, or perhaps thousands of cell phones can give a detailed picture of local traffic that is, says Bouwer, "accurate, timely, and reliable to an unprecedented degree."

Cell phone users worried about how this will affect their privacy need to look to privacy protection laws for ongoing security. However, the information about the movement of your cell phone extracted by your phone service provider and sold to traffic information suppliers such as AirSage will not, they assure us, include anything that would identify you personally.

It would be purely related to which way your phone is moving and how fast.

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