Highways Agency tracks Brits' every move by their mobes: THE TRUTH

Re: Amazing

Depends on which people are benefiting .. there's no evidence any of this is being used for the good of the motoring public ..

Re: Compliance and Annoyance in One Easy Step

"Besides. How can this possibly be cheaper than setting up the traditional pneumatic cross-lane traffic counters?"

We used to jump up and down on the older ones.

Most are now not pneumatic and do calculations to try and separate bike, cars, trucks.

Re: Compliance and Annoyance in One Easy Step

"I don't like the idea of mass collected data being used by any government, it is bound to escalate and be used in the future far outside of its initial purpose. "

I'm sorry Don Jefe, you're behind the times. Your and my government have already escalated data collection to cover as much as possible as has been well documented of late. Here in the UK the unaccountable quango known as ACPO (association of chief police officers) already have a system deployed to read, monitor and record number plates for the purposes of tracking and recording individual movements on the UK's trunk roads, so the UK's Stasi already have that.

However, the UK Highways Agency (generally speaking one of our better government operations) merely maintain, operate and upgrade our major roads, so they actually have a reasonable excuse for tracking vehicle movements, but ACPO aren't sharing the information they've hoovered up (although the ACPO ANPR cameras are often mounted on Highways Agency property). Moreover, simple induction or pressure traffic counters don't tell you important things like the routes taken by vehicles, which is important when looking to (say) improve junction design.

As others have said, this is benign use of data by an organisation actually trying to provide me with a service, rather than an unaccountable bunch hoping to track my movements "just in case I might commit a crime".

Re: Compliance and Annoyance in One Easy Step

The traffic counters tell you a vehicle is in that particular location. It doesn't tell you that if you put another road in a different part of the country, that vehicle would find a quicker route and would need to be there.

Re: Compliance and Annoyance in One Easy Step

I don't like the idea of mass collected data being used by any government

Hate to break it to you Don, but collecting massive data and then using it is the purpose of a government. In politics, everything from fiscal policy to defence and everything in between is decided by looking at the numbers and determining a course of action that keeps you headed towards $DESTINATION. The difference between political parties is where $DESTINATION is.

For example, its necessary to know how many people are driving on a given road and where they are flowing to so that you can build enough roads to keep people moving efficiently, which is one of the purposes of the Highways Agency.

Re: Compliance and Annoyance in One Easy Step

How is this any worse than the data Google Maps currently collects from our mobes to display traffic congestion info? You can opt out from participating but who bothers?

Re: Compliance and Annoyance in One Easy Step

"How can this possibly be cheaper than setting up the traditional pneumatic cross-lane traffic counters?"

Tracking mobiles enables you to get information about the whole journey that was taken. Getting the same info using pneumatic cross-lane traffic counters would mean that every road would need to have them - surelt that's got to be more expensive?

Pseudonymised is the word. They can't tell who you are but it is a unique reference that doesn't change.

Re: I can defeat phone tracking

Turn it off when? All the time? Don't bother owning one then.

There is already mission creep here isn't there? They are buying phone tracking data/statistics. Not data just for people who are driving, how could you separate that out? They are not even limiting the data to just car owners, I don't see how they could.

And if you live by a major trunk road, how can they tell if that static dot is you stuck in traffic or you in your living room?

Re: I can defeat phone tracking

Is it? Can you actually turn off an iPhone? I thought the new tracking stuff they've included in case it gets nicked prevented that from being possible.

Re: Typical waste of money

Eliminate traffic lights as much as possible.

Stopping one set of traffic to allow another to pass is the most ridiculous of traffic management schemes. Use roundabouts - multiple people can go in multiple directions simultaneously, the larger queue gets an implicit priority which lets it clear faster. Combine with judicious use of hatched areas on larger roundabouts to prevent gridlock. The traffic then never *actually* stops, it just moves slowly at worst. And where there's a huge queue of people wanting to get out, they can and can clear that queue quicker at the temporary expense of other routes (but don't match large routes and small routes on the same damn roundabout, anyway).

Honestly, I set my sat-nav and then adjust the course to the route with the least number of traffic lights (anyone know a sat-nav that can automatically add half-of-the-full-traffic-light-cycle-time as an average delay at it?). It's almost always the same or faster in terms of getting to my final destination even if the actual route is longer (but that just means that my average speed is higher for the same journey, which is usually more fuel-efficient and much less frustrating).

Traffic lights STOP half (or sometimes 3/4's) of the traffic to let another continue unimpeded, then BLOCK those that it was letting move to allow others to move. It's slow, inefficient, builds queues, annoying to drive (stop, start, stop, start, queue, queue, queue, quick-go!), and leaves cars sitting still with their engines running.

Don't even get me started on traffic-lights-on-a-roundabout. All that means is that you cocked up your implementation of a roundabout and/or don't want to break up the traffic properly.

My daily journey to work crossing West-East London takes over an hour. I can do it in the same time, with less traffic, virtually non-stop, by coming out of town, onto roads with minimal traffic management, going 30 miles more at motorway speeds and have done reliably for several years. The times that there are actually traffic/accidents/diversions, it's only slightly slower than the "default" traffic-light-laden route is on average anyway. The slowest part of my journey is actually getting to the part that lets me drive, use roundabouts and join motorways seamlessly, and is a mere 8% of my overall journey. And most of that time is spent at damn traffic lights.

Re: Typical waste of money

Yes, you know which roads don't have enough capacity for the job, but do you know why they don't have enough capacity for the job?

For example, is the M25 at Heathrow so busy because lots of people want to go to Heathrow? If it is, then you improve public transport links to the airport, you add another lane to the 6 lanes each way it already has and so on.

Or is it so busy because people want to get from eg M4 or M40 to M3 or A3, and that is the only realistic way to do it at the moment. Then you complete the M31 (currenty A3290/A329(M)/A329) so that they have a shorter route. Or do they want to get from North to South, and not pay the toll at Dartford? Then there might be a different solution.

Re: Typical waste of money

You just demonstrated why they need this information, most people think they "know" what needs to be done, but in reality you know what affects your little bubble, which seems to be Kent. The problems you describe aren't unique to Kent, but you need consistent information on a national scale in order to determine where to correctly spend the cash.

Re: Typical waste of money

@ AC 25/9 11:57

All the stuff you're ranting about was originally on the design plans and were trashed in the 1970s due to environmental and political objections. The M25 itself is an amalgamation of ring3 and 4 (which is why it goes to a greater radius road around watford and why there is a section of motorway-class road just north of the M25 between the M11 and the A1

I suggest you acquaint yourself with the history of the London Ringway plan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Ringways is a good starting point.

Re: How is anonymisation done?

well in the case of Beijing, in order to crowd-source the road-traffic situation in near realtime they entered a random selection of phones into their traffic management system. This random selection of phones was obviously the long list of national annoying people, people who remember T!@nenmen Square, who protested about corruption, belonged to a minority etc

I have a page in chinese about it on my work PC so can't give the link at present.

Basically that's already a 'worst-case' anonymisation example; hopefully UK might be more prone to choosing the "give half a de-anonymisation key each to 2 ministries/Groups who don't get on" best practise? e.g. NUM & Coal Board, ASLEF & BR, Highways Agency & Ramblers Association

Re: I am screwing up the results!

Or two people in one car?

Re: I am screwing up the results!

And what does it count every time the National Express bus goes past?

Knowing which house my phone is at each night is a very private issue.

Re: Riled Telegraph

Are you an MP then and don't like 'em exposing your expenses.

Re: I wish the US D.O.T. was this smart!

that'll be those dead straight roads with the 55Mph speed limit...., I could barely keep awake.

If every journey had a unique ID with nothing to link it then there would be little to worry about.

- still possible to identify where people living at addresses in/near the covered areas work, but that route is part of the point.

The problem is that we don't know.

We didn't know they were doing this, and we don't know what the anonymisation method is.

If the method is "each phone has a random GUID" then it's not actually anonymous at all, because it becomes trivial to track an individual all over and then link everything together if they go somewhere "interesting".

So how is it done?

Without knowing the method, it's impossible to know whether the data is actually anonymous, or just "We changed everybody's name but you can still see their faces"