Mobile Millennium: GPS Mobile Phones as Traffic Probes, California Networked Traveler - Safe Trip 21 Phase II

Recent advances in mobile devices and internet technology have led the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) to investigate a data collection solution that offers improved data reliability and availability at a significantly lower cost. It has been postulated that information from GPS cell phones could provide position and speed data -- referred to as probe data -- for highways and arterials in near real time over much of the transportation network. The Mobile Millennium project was established to determine if the collection and use of probe data for traveler information and traffic management was technically and institutionally feasible in order to provide a more reliable solution to the collection of traffic data. The Mobile Millennium project deployed thousands of phones in the San Francisco Bay Area in a short timeframe. The traffic data collected from those phones was processed into meaningful traveler information and fed back to a variety of channels, including the mobile handsets that generated it in the first place. Mobile Millennium established a community of individuals that generated valuable mobile content for one another and for society at large. The privacy of those individuals was strongly protected. It was also one of the first instances of crowd sourcing of GPS data for travel information purposes.