Real time traffic congestion display.I would like to know what the actual traffic conditions are for a particular route before I leave home.It would be possible to track all the cell phones carried by commuters in their cars along my route and monitor that time it takes them to travel from one cell site to anotherBy displaying and calculating the length of time it took the previous cell phone (carried by a commuter) to travel the same roadways and direction I intend to travel, I would get a better estimate of traffic conditions.Cell phone privacy would be maintained by gathering just the unique ID of the phone, not user information. And by aggregating the travel of several phones between points with an internet display of a map overlay would show bottlenecks. I realize this system would have to be orchestrated by several PCS providers, they are the only ones with access to track phones. The ability to ‘market’ the patterns of large blocks of commuters could be valuable to several different agencies.The primary market would be State Highway Departments, secondarily would be TV and Radio station news, lastly would be consumers.
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This already exists in a few other countries, the UK being one of them. (Real-time data is being collected from GPS units in cars, then relayed via interactive maps, to in-car nav systems, cell phones, pda's etc. A couple of hurdles in North America, but certainly do-able...
i am a big fan of integrating everyone's gps to give the best route in terms of traffic. i think the main problem is that nobody wants the government following their every move. of course the government can already follow them if they have GPS on but people don't realize this. the problem is getting a critical mass of people to get the idea on the ground, and i think the best way to do that would be to go through a system like OnStar.