Verizon partners with AirSage to track traffic

By ARIEL HART

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

If you have a Verizon cell phone, someday you may be helping the state Department of Transportation track road congestion.

AirSage, a company that collects congestion data, tracks cell phones that are turned on as they travel in cars down the roadways. Slower-than-normal travel indicates a traffic jam.

The company started tracking Sprint phones for Georgia DOT in 2005, a research project that ended last year. Now AirSage has also inked a deal with Verizon Wireless, and they are in talks with DOT, hoping to win a deal to provide data, said AirSage’s president, Cy Smith.

AirSage says the Verizon deal will quadruple the amount of data it gets, with about 120 million phones nationwide. Company officials say they make the data anonymous so that neither DOT nor AirSage has a record of who traveled where. The phone doesn’t have to be in use to send out its signal, just turned on.

DOT traditionally has tracked congestion using a more reliable but much more expensive system of underground sensors and traffic cameras. Unlike cell phone technology, those can show not only how fast traffic is going but how many cars are on the road. A hot new market is emerging with companies like Traffic.com, Inrix and AirSage trying to track congestion with new technology and make money from the data.