Crowd-sourcing Traffic Information
By Francis | July 26th, 2009
Traffic congestion is not really a big problem in a mid size town like Rochester NY where I live. However, I do listen to the traffic report on the radio to see what is in front of me as I get onto the highway. Unless the highway is totally blocked off, I usually do not make any adjustments to my route. Most of the time I do not have any idea of how bad the congestions are and do not know how the situations of the other roads.
Last week, I saw a recording of a talk from the PARC Forum “Mobile millennium: using smartphones to monitor traffic in privacy aware environments” by Alexandre Bayen. You might have seen reports of the Mobile Millennium project on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNET, NPR, KGO or BBC. This presentation gave a more in depth discussion about the details and the description of experiments that were performed. For the techies, this gives us a better understanding of the thoughts and the algorithms being used. It also addresses some of the security concerns and how the mobiles devices enables “crowd-sourcing” to provide a “give and take” fair sharing of information. Since the concept relies on mobile devices, this technology can potentially be applied to third world countries where there are not a lot of build-in traffic monitoring infrastructure while mobile devices are the prevalent communication device. It turned out that to get enough information, only a small percentage of mobile users have to sign up to the Mobile Millennium project.
I can’t wait for the day when one can get constant bird’s eye view of the traffic conditions on all the possible routes that one can take. Currently, the pilot is being conducted in northern California only. Details can be found on the Mobile Millennium website. It appears that there are still some limitations. For example, one cannot differentiate the traffic on the HOV lanes and regular traffic. Also, the traffic lights can provide misleading information. But, even with these limitations, I would be willing to try it out. Too bad I do not live in the northern CA area and the SW does not work on the iPhone yet.
A description of the presentation and the recording of the presentation can be found at: http://www.parc.com/event/896/mobile-millennium.html.
