Mobile monitoring

Drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area with GPS-enabled mobile phones will soon be able to tap into new technology that promises to transform traffic monitoring.

Moments before midnight on Monday 10 November, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, will publicly release pilot software that turns cellular devices into mobile traffic probes, providing real-time information on traffic flow and travel times.

Anyone can download the free software at www.traffic.berkeley.edu.

It will work on most GPS-enabled cell phones operating on GSM networks (such as AT&T and T-mobile) that are capable of installing and running Java applications.

As vehicles pass through the system's virtual trip lines (geographic markers defined by GPS coordinates) the phones will send anonymous speed and location readings to servers.

The data will be integrated into traffic models that produce an estimate of traffic flow, before being relayed back to the mobile phones and posted online.