One fine day a cellphone could find you a parking ...

Navigation: Main page

Author: Kevin Maney

Section: Money, Pg. 03b

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- You have a meeting downtown. You're late. Traffic is terrible. You try an alternate route, and it's worse. Your nerves fray.

You get to the address of the meeting and start looking for parking. There's nothing on the street. You try to find a parking garage, but they all have signs that say "full." You pound the steering wheel and growl like a dog. You go around a few more blocks, burning gas, spitting CO into the atmosphere, helping ensure that Atlanta will be a coastal city by 2020.

Desperate, you park illegally and run to the scheduled conference room -- finding no one there and no note saying the meeting room had been changed.

All of that is an information problem, and it could be solved by a new set of emerging data.

In fact, this new data -- gleaned from location-based cellphone systems and big Wi-Fi networks -- could change urban planning, alter the way residents interact and make cities more efficient.

In most major cities, cellphone companies have begun turning on technology that uses signals from cell towers and sometimes global-positioning satellites to pinpoint the location of cellphones. At the same time, metropolises such as San Francisco, Houston and Philadelphia are plowing ahead with plans to build citywide Wi-Fi networks. Each node in a Wi-Fi network would know how many computers were connected to it.

There's an unintended consequence to both those developments: mountains of data about where people are at any given time. The cell system can know where cellphones are -- and most adults these days have cellphones. A Wi-Fi system knows where people are working on their laptops, give or take the percentage that are just perusing MySpace.

We're talking about anonymized, high-level, aggregated data -- so it's not about invading your privacy and tracking individuals.

That data can then be put on a map to show how a city's population moves and changes through the day. Technologists think it's a way to put a city on the Internet so people can interact with it.

"We're trying to create a human-computer interface with cities," says Assaf Biderman, a scruffy graduate student in the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The lab, led by MIT professor Carlo Ratti, is a good place to see what might be coming. The researchers started with Graz, Austria -- because the Austrian cellphone company cooperated.

At regular time intervals, the MIT researchers collect the pings from Graz cellphones. Biderman and his partner, Andres Sevtsuk, show me how this looks when mapped. You can see Graz wake as people turn on their phones, each represented by a tiny dot. You can see how the dots cluster in suburbs and neighborhoods in the morning. As rush hour nears, the dots begin flowing to business districts. As the clock ticks, the clusters shift and move.

The researchers pull up a similar map of the Wi-Fi network that blankets MIT. As they speed up the time, you see where students and faculty move their laptops. "Activity in the academic buildings shifts to dorms only after 11 p.m.," Sevtsuk says. "That's typical for MIT, but not for other parts of the city."

So what's this good for?

Some possibilities are straightforward. City planners, real estate developers, retailers and so on can see where people go at what times, helping them make better decisions about roads, buildings and services. Drivers could see traffic patterns and detour around jams. During a disaster, officials might be able to see in real time that people are jamming one way out of town, and send them a different way.

The real fun would come once cities and companies layer other data and services on top.

A simple one: Manhattan taxis. Each might have a wireless gadget that constantly pings the city's system with its location. Hailing a cab would mean flipping open your cellphone, seeing on a map if a taxi is close, and shooting that driver a wireless request to get picked up.

Then there's parking, which has to be one of the great human and natural resource sinkholes in modern life. In April, Houston approved a contract to install 1,500 parking meters that will connect to the Net via Wi-Fi, for now, so users can pay by cellphone or credit card.

But let's say Houston upgrades each meter with an infrared sensor that can tell if a car is parked in its space. Then the meters could use their Wi-Fi connections to tell the city which spaces are open. At the same time, a driver could use her cellphone to tell the city she's looking for a space. Since the system would know where she is, it could show her the nearest free spaces.

In fact, as Sevtsuk notes with a grin, the system could let a driver know the location of other nearby cars that are also looking for parking spaces. "Then you could see your competitors and decide which one you could get to first," he says.

Now, that could get interesting.

Finally, there's the problem of arriving late to a meeting and finding the room has been changed. Once a city is online, it can flip text messaging on its head. Now, text messages break down location, going to the recipient no matter where he or she is. MIT is experimenting with a system that leaves messages in a particular room or place. Anyone who arrives there gets that message on his or her cellphone or computer.

In MIT's version of the future, you'd head to that meeting downtown and the city would route you around traffic. You'd get into town and the city would guide you to a parking space. And if the meeting had moved, you'd get to the room and your phone would buzz with a note telling you where to go.

Of course, something like this can be abused. Hackers will find a way to track an individual's movements. Companies will leave spam messages for Cialis in conference rooms. But all in all, it looks like new information might help solve some very old problems. --- E-mail kmaney@usatoday.com

(c) USA TODAY, 2006