Unclogging traffic congestion

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Alex Pines: My name is Alex Pines, I'm a professor of Systems Usury at U. C. Berkeley, and I work on using cell phone technology to build traffic monitoring systems.

Music The problem with traffic today is that we have no good way to measure it. One the major products I'm working on is called Mobile Millennium. Mobile Millennium is a traffic information system that uses GPS inside phones to gather traffic information, process it, and broadcast it back to the phones in real time to show people traffic conditions around them. The software takes the data I gathered from the phones, and then it puts it in mathematical models that help us understand traffic. Everybody shares their data. The whole data gets sent to central system. The system aggregates the data in the mathematical models, provides a global traffic map for the entire region covered by the system, and then ships it back to the entire pool of users. So people have an incentive to share their information, because in return they get everybody else's information in the form of a speed map. So for example, I'm on Bay Bridge and I'm driving towards the city and the data I've sent by the GPS on the phone to the system shows a very big drop in velocity. That's a shockwave. I just entered massive congestion. What will happen in the system is the mathematical models will understand that shockwave... and will estimate its location, and based on this estimate, the length before the whole bridge gets congested. I think that this traffic information system will evolve into a system where we have almost global coverage of the major access, so the imminent future will be that very soon when more and more people are participating, we're able to provide information at a global scale.

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