Traffic Works

Nokia Research with Berkeley, University California and California transportation authority “CalTrans” are driving innovation to free us from traffic jams for good. In the future, your mobile will help ensure you’re never late for your meeting, that you get home on time for your kid’s birthday, and you get to the cinema in time for the start of the film.

Your Nokia mobile will assist you, letting you know that you're meeting your friend in one hour and informing you that the traffic is picking up, and that you should consider leaving. Your mobile will then offer to route you using real-time traffic flow data to avoid delays.

By collecting real-time traffic flow data from your and hundreds of other GPS-enabled mobiles as people commute in their cars. Your device will share anonomously its location and the speed its travelling at via the Internet. All the data will then be aggregated and a traffic map is generated. This map of the traffic flow will be available for your mobile to use.

Your mobile, with a bit of added intelligence, will be able to combine this traffic data with your commuting patterns, calendar, and current position offering contextually relevant personal assistance.

Today, real-time traffic information is captured by deploying sensor networks along road sides. This system is limited, as it cannot cover every road for reasons of cost. By utilizing GPS enabled mobile phones the data is more accurate compared to the data collected by sensor networks. The GPS system is also much cheaper as the sensor networks are expensive to deploy and maintain.

In February 2008, an all-day field experiment was run to test this developing technology in real-time conditions. It used 100 cars with drivers on a 10 mile stretch of Californian highway. Each of the 100 cars was equipped with a Nokia N95 mobile with an application which sent location and travel speed data provided by the Nokia N95’s integrated GPS. GPS can pinpoint a car's location with an accuracy of a few meters and calculate traveling speed to within 3 miles per hour.

Using this data to estimate prevailing speeds and travel times, researchers were able to obtain a picture of real-time traffic conditions. Information was displayed on the Internet, allowing viewers to visualize traffic in real time. Read more about the 100 Cars trial and other Nokia research projects.

Nokia Maps puts maps and navigation in your hand today. With free maps for more than 200 countries, and with 15 million points of interest pre-loaded, you can plan your route street by street or city to city. Download for free