MoDOT tracking cell phone signals to monitor traffic speed, congestion

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Some cell phone users in Kansas City and St. Louis may be participating in an experiment, unbeknownst to them, every time they take to the highway.

After more than a year delay, a company working for the Missouri Department of Transportation has begun anonymously monitoring cell phone signals along certain roads as a high-tech way of tracking vehicle speeds and warning motorists of traffic jams.

For now, the company is keeping the information to itself. But within weeks, it plans to share it with state highway officials. If they like what they see, state officials could give the green light to deploy the traffic monitoring technology on 5,500 miles of Missouri's major roads.

The ultimate goal is for motorists to get real-time traffic information over the Internet, electronic highway road signs or a toll-free phone number.

Whether that ever becomes reality remains a big question.

Privacy concerns appear to have slowed down the Missouri project -- the largest of its kind nationally -- which was supposed to have been deployed statewide by summer 2006 under a contract with Markham, Canada-based Delcan Corp.

A similar Delcan project in Maryland never made it to the public stage.

And a Florida study, while confirming that cell-phone-based traffic predictions can work, concluded the technology is not accurate in congested traffic -- the very place it's most needed.

All that aside, "we're still very encouraged by the promise of the technology," said Troy Pinkerton, a traffic liaison engineer working on the project for the Missouri transportation department. "Hopefully, we'll be successful."

Many cities and states measure traffic speed and volume by embedding sensors in pavement or mounting scanners along the road. But those methods can be expensive and take only a snapshot of traffic at a particular spot.

The wireless phone technology uses the frequent signals sent to towers to track their movement from one cell to another.

Then it overlays that data with highway maps to estimate where the phones are and how fast they are moving. Lumping thousands of those signals together can indicate traffic flow.

Technology firms like Delcan and Atlanta-based AirSage Inc. insist their data remain anonymous, leaving no way to track specific people from their driveway to their destination.

But privacy concerns persist.

When it won the Missouri contract in December 2005, Delcan planned on using data from Cingular Wireless. But before the project could ever get started, Cingular opted out.

Pinkerton said Cingular had "some invasion of privacy concerns."

Cingular, now called AT&T, halted a similar arrangement with Delcan in February 2006 to share data derived from its Baltimore-area customers, said Glenn McLaughlin, deputy director of Maryland's highway management and operations program.

"The cell phone company thought it just wasn't worth the risk that the public might perceive their personal information was being used that way," McLaughlin said.

AT&T spokeswoman Chelsey Ilten downplayed privacy concerns. The company decided that using cell phone signals for traffic projects "just didn't fit into our business priorities," she said.

Although it took a while, a Delcan official said the company now has arrangement with a different wireless phone service to provide data for the Missouri project. But Delcan declined to identify the company, claiming it had a nondisclosure agreement, and declined to discuss its cell phone tracking projects.

Sprint Nextel Corp. provides data for AirSage traffic flow projects under way in Georgia, Minnesota and Wisconsin, among other places. But a Sprint spokeswoman said the phone company is not involved in the Missouri project, nor with other contractors besides AirSage.

A recent study by researchers at Florida International University said nearly 30 companies and organizations claim to have the capability to provide real-time traffic data based on anonymous information gleaned from cell phones. The study, conducted for the Florida Department of Transportation, looked specifically at projects run by AirSage, Delcan and three other providers.

Under normal traffic conditions, cell phone technology provided pretty good traffic flow and travel time estimations, the study found.

But "the cell phone technology is not accurate in congested traffic conditions, where the data is more important than in the free-flow traffic conditions, and the accuracy decreases rapidly as the congestion increases," according to the Florida report from this April.

Tom Bouwer, vice president of sales and marketing at AirSage, said the company's technology has improved since the report's data was collected a year ago, and it can now more accurately track how fast vehicles are moving.

But the report also notes that privacy concerns have been growing.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) raised concerns a couple years ago that once the cell phone data is collected and shared, it could end up being used for other government purposes such as law enforcement centers. Despite assurances to the contrary from the technology's proponents, those concerns remain, said Lillie Coney, EPIC's associate director.

"The mission creep potential is there," Coney said. "There are other ways of figuring out traffic patterns without having to go to something that's so identifiable as a cell phone."

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A look at cell phone tracking in Missouri

According to MoDOT, the tracking technology is being tested in the following areas:

KANSAS CITY

• Interstate 70, between I-435 and I-470.
• Interstate 435 south, from I-70 to roughly the Kansas border.
• Interstate 470, between I-70 and Missouri 350.
• Missouri 350, between I-435 and I-470.

ST. LOUIS

• Interstate 64, between I-170 and Route K.
• Interstate 70, between I-170 and Route K.
• Interstate 170, between I-70 and I-64.
• Interstate 270, between I-70 and I-64.
• Route K, between I-70 and I-64.

-- AP