From slashdot:
“In an interesting and innovative way Bangalore city, India, has come up with a way to monitor road traffic congestion by monitoring the density of mobile phones. This can give users quantitative and directional information of traffic flow without significant additional infrastructure investments. The congestion data is already available online.”
Yes, yes, all well and good, but it doesn’t say what the nature of the delay is, or if it will be cleared up in 10 minutes or 10 hours.
Someone needs to develop a subsciption service whereby information regarding any traffic accidents or delays within the radius of a given mobile phone tower is relayed directly to drivers in cars. It would be a subscription service with an annual fee or something and a per message cost. Connect the phone to the sat nav system and it would be able to update route delays and plot a different route in ‘real time’. The information relayed would be provided by emergency service personal at the base of operations, which is in continual radio contact with the emergency service personal in the field. Or depending on the popularity of the service, ‘spotters’ could actually be hired, maybe even using the military-grade unmanned drones… lol