Click the image to access the gallery(Credit: CNET Networks)
It's not often that you get people volunteering to get stuck in traffic. But that's exactly what happened today in Northern California as 150 students from UC Berkeley participated a project devised by their university in collaboration with Nokia and the California Transportation Department to test the potential of using GPS-enabled, internet-connected cell phones as aids for reporting real-time information on traffic congestion. Real-time traffic services are nothing new: Services from Satellite companies such as XM and Sirius as well as from Google and Yahoo Maps provide color-coded estimates of traffic flow and congestion in certain major urban areas. The trouble is that these data feeds rely on a complex infrastructure of roadside and pavement-mounted sensors and cameras, which cost a fortune to install and maintain. As we found in recent field test, they're also not always completely accurate. Today's project, known as "Mobile Century" was designed to test the accuracy and viability of using a network of unmodified Nokia N95 smartphones as anonymously-reporting probes in a real-world traffic environment. Check out our photo gallery and CNET News.com's video to get a glimpse of the possible future for real-time traffic services.
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