NEWS: Beating congestion with mobiles

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/6252326.stm>

Working out how people use a city's roads and planning for it, can be
difficult, but research into mobile phone use may hold the key to
preventing traffic jams in the future.

[MORE]

"John Navas" <spamfilter1@navasgroup.com> wrote in message
news:krae831ki5gftc8g1pj5gfqmg8ipp36jjl@4ax.com...
> <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/6252326.stm>
>
> Working out how people use a city's roads and planning for it, can be
> difficult, but research into mobile phone use may hold the key to
> preventing traffic jams in the future.

The research opportunities are intriguing. The article doesn't give a lot of
details, but it sounds like it's only tracking phones' movement from cell to
cell, which is a pretty coarse measurement. A phone with GPS capability
could monitor its own travels throughout the day and just send a few highly
compressed packets per day to tell where it's been. Yes, I know there are
privacy issues, but there are also legitimate research opportunities.

Still, the thing that comes to mind first is that since we're talking about
a population who have mobile phones and a city that is densely enough
populated to ensure wifi access is available everywhere, maybe a lot of
those people can just use this technology to do their business online, so
they don't have to go out and congest the roads in the first place. And they
would keep the air cleaner as part of the deal. When I looked at that map,
it occurred to me that they could use the same map to show levels of air
pollution.