Join the network, beat all the traffic

“When we tell people about it, we say, ‘We have a new way of getting traffic volume and speed information.’ ... They get paranoid when they hear it’s cell data.”

The cellphone data that the state receives, however, are “anonymized” — that is, stripped of any identifying information such as the user’s phone number — and that allays most people’s concerns, officials said.

The location information Dash gathers — which by contrast comes from GPS coordinates, not cell-tower data — will similarly be anonymized, company officials said.

“If the FBI comes in tomorrow and says, ‘Where were you at 3 p.m. yesterday?’ the honest answer will be, ‘We don’t know,’ “ Robert Acker, Dash’s senior vice president of marketing, said.

The Dash device also offers a layer of what might be called domestic privacy: It allows users to delete recently searched-for destinations and services. Internally, company officials call that “the girlfriend program.”

The thorniest technological challenge facing efforts like Dash’s is how to turn the mountain of minute-by-minute location data from cars into a sensible map of traffic.

Simply translating a car’s speed into traffic levels doesn’t work. A car’s slow movement might only reflect a slowpoke behind the wheel. A faster speed might only reflect an aggressive driver, or someone cruising the HOV lane.

And unless they are properly accounted for, stoplights could look like traffic jams, which is why earlier efforts focused on highways alone. To address such problems, the Dash software looks for patterns in the data and throws out the outliers.

“It isn’t enough to take the data and say this is the speed on the roadways,” said Bryan Mistele, president of INRIX, a traffic-reporting company spun off by Microsoft that provides the baseline data in Dash’s system.

“You have to figure out what’s going on.”

The company hopes that by using INRIX’s traffic data as a baseline, and by offering Internet access, it will draw customers before the Dash driver network becomes widespread.

Whether the Dash venture works out, experts in the field say that eventually one of the companies experimenting with the technology will get it right.

John Frawley, executive vice president of broadcast operations at Westwood One, which provides traffic information to more than 2,400 radio stations around the country, called it the industry’s hottest topic.

Once it works, “this kind of GPS tracking is going to make some of the older technology obsolete almost instantaneously,” he said.

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