For anyone who has used the traffic feature of a navigation unit, you know most systems are far from “real” time. The unit could be accessing info a half a hour old, and it certainly can’t keep up to the minute about everything on the road.
One technology that would be vastly superior to current resources is capturing traffic information through 2-way GPS units. Users would transmit information about what is going on in their stretch of pavement and that info would be analyzed and resubmitted to all users. The GPS owners are therefore generating the data (Dash Express is a unit that does this now).
This might raise a few eyebrows for those who fear a Big Brother scenario. It’s not that paranoid to resist the idea of some company knowing where you are all the time. Nokia and UC Berkeley researchers got together to experiment on capturing traffic info while preserving users’ privacy.
According to the press release, researchers wanted to “test the traffic data collection and aggregation system, while studying the trade-offs between data accuracy, personal privacy, and data collection costs. The software aggregating the GPS feeds immediately disassociates that data from an individual device and combines it with the general stream of traffic data. To protect privacy, all data is anonymous and aggregated, and protected by banking-grade encryption”
The researchers believe that less than 5% of drivers need to contribute info for the system to function effectively. If a user didn’t want to contribute, all they had to do was turn off the feed from their GPS-enabled device. For Nokia, technology like this could lead to the phone becoming a “personal travel planner.” Phones already are becoming our do-all gadget.
This technology would also reduce the state’s need to invest in traffic information infrastructure. Instead, they could pull all their data from our devices! Congestion causes 4.2 billion hours extra travel every year in the U.S. alone. In crowded markets, there aren’t that many alternative routes to take, but if we had a better source of information, we might be able to cut down those hours spent in gridlock (and cut down on fuel consumption and pollution at the same time).