[OSM-dev] real-time traffic map

[Adrian Vogt]

Dear Bogdan,

I loosely remember a short report in a scientific TV show (Menschen  
Technik Wissenschaft on swiss TV) reporting that Swisscom has provided  
*anonymized* cell-phone data to students for an evaluation on whether  
that data could be useful in traffic analysis. As far as I remember  
that report, the where successfully in interpreting that data and  
everything looked VERY nice. The only problem is that at that time,  
Swisscom did not see a real benefit in operating an infrastructure,  
which delivers this kind of data continuously.

But I still believe this would be the most cost effective way to get  
such data, as there are many (millions) of subscribers and there is no  
cost for those providing the data (the people "running" around with  
their mobile phone). The investment of mobile phone company could be  
compensated by adequate pricing of the data (or making it free as a  
marketing instrument). Depending on the exact architecture, the time  
resolution could be quite fine (e.g. 15 minute intervals or even  
small). As there are so many data-points available by using the cell- 
phone network data (of course in anonymized form), you can even detect/ 
separate trains (300 cell phones moving in sync) from motor-ways  
(thousands of cell phones in constant flow).

I am not 100% sure, but their thesis should be linked as: http://www.ifi.uzh.ch/archive/mastertheses/DA_Arbeiten_2004/Schucan_Giachem.pdf 
  . Unfortunately its written in German, so you will have to run it  
through a translation services if that is an issue.


Regards
Adrian

On 20.Aug.2008, at 12:00, Bogdan Bivolaru wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> Do you know any way to maintain an instantaneous map of a road? By  
> that I mean: can all the drivers using OpenStreetMap + GPS upload  
> their current location and direction they are going to, instant &  
> average speed to some server and then can the server process the  
> uploads to show the average speed and traffic?