Bill Ankner, director of the Missouri Transportation Institute at UMR, spoke at today's Chancellor's Council meeting about the various projects MTI is involved in.
One project in particular seemed to grab the audience's attention. Ankner described how MTI is working with Delcan Traffic Monitoring to provide real-time traffic information using cell phone signals. A quick Google search served up this article, which gives more detail about the work:
If cell phone signal traffic monitoring technology continues building steam, we all may be acting as traffic probes on the highway.Missouri is the latest state to implement a program that measures traffic congestion on major roads based on the average time it takes drivers' cell phone signals to pass from cell tower to cell tower along those roads....[I]n February, Missouri became the first to carry out a statewide implementation, covering 5,500 miles of its busiest roads -- generally interstates and numbered routes. ...
Companies such as Delcan, Missouri's cellular traffic monitoring provider, pay cellular companies for the right to integrate their software with the companies' signal location databases. The software is programmed with a road map of each zone and uses algorithms to guess the route a driver takes and the driver's speed from tower to tower. The average speed of each route is continually recalculated to produce real-time traffic data -- states transmit this information to motorists through color-coded online graphics and electronic road signs.
Ideas like these that piggyback other inventions (the cell phone) are an engineer's dream. Sure cell phones are great... but how can we squeeze even more efficiency out of them?