A new program by UC Berkeley, Mobile Millennium has been launched, in limited basis, to assist you with traffic information and ease your morning or evening commute. The program relies heavily on GPS enabled cell phones and traffic sensors already present or to to be placed in the future.
Once decided to participate in the program, Mobile Millennium project,(link below for downloading the program to your phone or mobile device) as you go driving around the city, GPS data will periodically and anonymously be sent to a collection of servers to be analyzed and presented to all the users. The data, which includes speed, location and other relevant information will be integrated with local maps to provide a traffic model consisting red, orange, yellow and green dots showing how the traffic moves on your friendly high ways. Which of course would have been green all over during the period of high gas prices, now becoming more of an orange yellow and red dots, with low gas prices.
The traffic information that you will be able to see on your mobile be just like those of morning news TV traffic reports.
Again community based project relies on the information provided by community and your participation will help a lot. If you are one of those civic minded people, you can download the program from project site, free of course, after registering. The program will work on most GPS-enabled cell phones that are capable of installing and running Java applications. The Web site mentions that it will be updated with a list of specific Nokia and non-Nokia phone models compatible with the software, continuously. (But with all those data flowing back and forth, a unlimited data plan will help a lot and is strongly suggested by the researchers).
The effort is a joint project by researchers from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering, Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto and UC Berkeley's California Center for Innovative Transportation and is a part of the Mobile Millennium project by . The new system uses digital mapping data from Chicago-based NAVTEQ, recently acquired by Nokia.
Mobile Millennium is supported by the U.S. Department of Transportation through the federal SafeTrip-21 initiative, which seeks technology solutions to improve safety and reduce congestion on the roadways, as well as by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans).
Register and download the program
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