For those who go out, they most concern about two things, weather and traffic.

Weather information could be easily obtained from broadcast, but how about traffic? Is there traffic jam around Shanghai Stadium? Shall we take the South-North free way? Doctor Bin Ran, Chairman of TrafficCast International and TrafficCast Shanghai, brought us good news during the interview with InformationWeek. “Office workers in Shanghai could check out real-time traffic information via TV before The World Exposition” Ran Bin said.

Forecasting traffic information and maintaining traffic free has been being highly focused on recently because of the coming World Olympics and World Expo. Comparing with weather forecast, real-time traffic forecast is much more difficult as traffic condition changes in every second.

Referring to western market, China ITS industry will set off a new upsurge since many companies have already or will provide kinds of new applications of real-time traffic information. However, the point is if those traffic data are precise and useful. Data collection is always being difficult to ITS organizations. Some traditional traffic detection equipments have already been installed in some major cities. However, information collected by those equipments is not enough. On one hand, recent traffic information is not precise and can not be transmitted to drivers in time. On the other hand, the expense used for maintaining facilities is a great deal. According to the introduction of Shiwei Zhang from Shanghai Traffic Information Center, there are mainly three traditional ways for gathering data based on loops, CCTV, and GPS separately, but results are not as good as expected. Now, a new and floating way of collecting data is being focused. Bin Ran said that Trafficcast could get traffic information through analysis of mobile network. There are several advantages of mobile data collection, low cost, short engineering period, wide coverage, etc. Accordingly, TrafficCast 2.0 system developed by TrafficCast will be used by Shanghai Mobile Communications Co., Ltd. in their new traffic information services. Although real-time traffic application is not ripe yet, some actual applications are just round the corner. On the background of Olympics, real-time traffic navigation is expected to be a dark horse, which will become the mainstream application in the future.

Mobile phone is considered to be a very good carrier of real-time traffic information besides professional equipments like navigation device. Since this January, people in Beijing could get real-time traffic information of freeway, major arterial, etc. by calling 12580. It is also hopeful for Shanghai Mobile to provide navigation services through MMS, WAP, voices, etc. According to Wenning Zhan from Shanghai Mobile, new services are being intensively tested. In the future, Shanghai citizens could get four kinds of traffic information, congestion condition updated in five minutes, best route from A to B according to time, speed, and congestion condition, traffic condition of hot spots, and particular incidents. However, comparing with navigation device, mobile phone is restricted by several aspects such as smaller screen. It has to do much more on its usability of real-time traffic navigation to attract customers.

Chinese URL:http://www.trafficcast.com.cn/news_08.05.20-1.htm