Technologue

Can we all agree we've seen and heard enough Chicken Little reportage about the evils of cell-phones? By now, we all know they're distracting and dangerous. It's equally clear that however much we regulate, legislate, or bloviate against them, mobiles are here to stay. Now, it turns out, there may be a reason to celebrate that seemingly bleak fact.

Soon, every metropolitan commuter with a handy may become part of a massive traffic-reporting network, making it possible at long last to obtain real-time data beamed to his car, PC, or even cell-phone about how fast traffic is flowing right now on the freeways and feeder roads he'll be driving on. Right about here, our AcuraLinked RL owners are rolling their eyes and thinking, "Big deal, I have that already." Well, yeah, if you're driving in one of 20 cities that have spent some $50,000-plus per mile of roadway to install and maintain cameras, radar units, and sensors in the pavement to monitor traffic flow. When do you suppose that sort of investment will be made in Pocatello, Idaho? They have traffic there, too, you know.

Such traffic information soon will be available with no infrastructure investment. Zero. Zilch. The idea is to passively "mine" data that already exists within the machinery of mobile-phone carriers. Here's how it works: As you drive down the road with a cellular phone switched on, your phone signal gets handed off from one cell tower to another to another. The boundaries where these handoffs take place are mapped with remarkable precision by the cell providers. By monitoring the cell-tower boundaries that individual phones cross and when they cross them, it becomes possible--with computer massaging and roadmap matching--to determine the average speed of traffic on the most heavily traveled roadways connecting these cell-tower borders. Two companies put such systems up and running this past summer: Atlanta-based AirSage Inc. is online in Norfolk, Virginia, and British ITIS Holdings plc, has its finger on the pulse of Baltimore traffic.

By now, our civil libertarian readers are borderline apoplectic, envisioning Orwellian nightmares of Big Brother mailing speeding tickets and road-use tolls without even having to pay for an ambush camera. They have a frighteningly valid point. The Federal Communications Commission made such remote-control highway robbery technically feasible when it ruled that, by the end of this year, 95 percent of all mobile handsets must be able to report their exact location to 911 emergency-response call centers (or to anyone else who can persuade the phone company to fork over the information).

As yet, there are insufficient legal protections against abuse of this so-called Automatic Location Identification hardware by the government, private investigators, or third-party advertisers. But the passive traffic-monitoring systems rolling out in Baltimore, Norfolk, and elsewhere this summer don't pose this kind of threat. That's because they don't rely on the ALI hardware and hence they never know the exact location or speed of an individual identifiable phone. Instead, they observe the tower-switching data for hundreds of phones--all of which are "anonymized" behind a firewall inside the carrier's computers--and then they let their own computers crunch probability programs that determine which roads the phones are flowing on and at what speeds.

Bottom line: If we're going to have cell-phones in cars, I'm eager to see them used to help speed my commute. Then, again, the surest (and perhaps the only) way to get the cell-phone out of my car would be to use it to send me a ticket for speeding.