The development of innovative and feasible traffic monitoring methods in association with experts and researchers from different organizations is a target according to ITS strategy of Finnra. At the moment mobile phones and networks are in focus; Finnra is surveying their possibilities as an alternative source of traffic data to the license plate reading in travel time estimation. Between 25th March and 30th June in 2002 there was a travel time service -pilot in operation on the urban ring road Keh 1 in Helsinki metropolitan area and on the rural highway VT 4 near city of Lahti. This pilot service was developed together with Finnra and Radiolinja, the second biggest mobile operator in Finland, and it utilizes Radiolinja's GSM-network for travel time monitoring. The intention was to compare in practice this new method to the existing license plate reading systems. The final evaluation of pilot will be available by end of November.
Abstract