Optus to monitor traffic flows by tracking drivers' cellphones

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 21 November 2006 00:18

Your IT - Home IT

In the UK (population 60 million), according to the ITIS website, it uses around 50,000 vehicles but focuses on those with very high mileages: AA (NRMA or RAC Vic equivalent) patrol cars, courier company National Express and Eddie Stobart, a large haulage truck operators. However the UK has a much smaller land mass and many more areas where congestion is a problem: in Australia congestion occurs almost entirely in major cities and a few main highways.

ITIS supplements this fleet with data from 'probe vehicles' chosen specifically to increase data quality in a more localised urban or inter-urban area, such as a local haulage or taxi operators. It also combines the cellphone location data with information from large telematics companies that track vehicles for logistics and fleet management purposes. It says that while location of cellphones derived from the network (triangulation from base stations) is less accurate than GPS locations, "this is compensated by the large number of mobile phones on any road, knowledge of the underlying road network and the application of statistical techniques."

In the UK and elsewhere, ITIS sells its service to fleet operators, government and local authorities and organisations that provide location based services to end users One example is Getmethere.co.uk a traffic information site operated by Toyota UK, which uses an IT IS traffic data feed to provide travel advice to road users.

Traffic Intelligence already has an Australian website on which it promises to offer such services. www.trafficintel.com.au. However, it is somewhat out of date. It presently states: "Traffic Intelligence is in the early stages commercialising the ITIS Floating Vehicle Data (FVD) and Cellular Floating Vehicle Data (CFVD) technologies in cooperation with a major cellular network. We expect to be providing high quality real time traffic information services before the end of 2005."