part the nine-gazillionith
The federal government has committed more than $50 million to build a sophisticated highway traffic monitoring system that has produced unreliable data and cannot freely share live reports on highway bottlenecks with the public, an audit by the Transportation Department’s inspector general has found.
Thousands of tiny traffic-monitoring sensors are being installed along highways in 27 cities nationwide under the program. The monitors collect information on lane occupancy and traffic speed, and the data then is supposed to be transmitted live to electronic message boards and other devices.[quote]
But the decade-old agreement that the department signed with Traffic.com, the contractor hired to install the system, included a provision that granted the contractor exclusive control of the data, says the report, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times in advance of its public release.
That means Traffic.com, a subsidiary of Navteq of Chicago1 can sell the data to commercial providers like The Weather Channel or post it on its own Internet site. But state and local governments that are partners in the project have been told they are not allowed to share the information with the public unless they pay a fee, the report says.
In San Francisco, for example, the state collects and distributes its own traffic data, offering traffic updates for the metropolitan area. But it cannot do the same with the detailed information gathered by Traffic.com through the federally subsidized system.
The Massachusetts Highway Department, the report says, was formally prohibited from using the data to offer highway message board estimates to Boston-area commuters on traffic delays. Local and state governments were also prohibited from posting the traffic information on government Internet sites or traffic information telephone hotlines, unless they paid Traffic.com a fee for the data.
State and local governments are allowed to use the data to study trends in highway use. But for the most part, Traffic.com is the only entity that stands to profit from the equipment installed in the public right of way and paid for with federal money, the report concluded.
[Click to continue reading U.S. System for Tracking Traffic Flow Is Faulted – NYTimes.com]
What lobbyist wrote this bill anyway? Was Bill Cat Killer Frist involved in some way? Really, why is this even a valid use of public tax dollars? Navteq doesn’t need federal money to underwrite its own infrastructure improvements. If it does, Navteq should rent the space on public highways, not be given the data for free, especially if its plan was all along to sell the data for profit.
Footnotes:- apparently, right down the street from me, 425 West Randolph St [↩]