Monitor Traffic Conditions with Cellphones

UC Berkeley students will participate in an experiment that uses cellphones to monitor road traffic. Many phones already have a GPS chip and it is clear that eventually all phones will have one. So the idea is to save the phone’s location every 3 seconds and send the information (wirelessly) to a server that will compute the bigger traffic picture.

It’s a really cool idea. It’s cheaper than adding sensors, and it would allow a view of all road traffic conditions – not just the major routes equipped with sensors. Now there are privacy concerns, but it should be possible to do something that is voluntary and anonymous.