SDOT gets new tech to track drivers

You might not notice them, though you have likely passed more than 1,000 spread throughout the city of Seattle.

Small, black antennas with a pancake shape affixed to light poles around town have been monitoring any mobile device that passes within their range for about a year. Some Seattleites are suspicious, while others hope their purpose will help them drive through town faster.

About a year ago, a small rubber antenna designed by Skywave Antennas in Huntsville, Ala. was installed on each box, Crosscut reports. Those antennas are part of a Wi-Fi network that tracks smartphones and tablets moving through each intersection. They can even determine how fast each device is moving.

“So each time you drive across that intersection and you have a tablet or a phone, it will ping,” said KIRO Radio’s Tom Tangney. “Since most of us have tablets or smartphones in our cars, it gives the Seattle Department of Transportation information about the fact you just went through that intersection and it could follow you through a thousand intersections.

“It is a way for government or traffic gurus to know how smoothly it is going and adapt to it.”

While the city has been collecting the data for about a year, none of the information has been used. The program is still collecting data. The system is aimed at taking a more in-depth look at driving behavior on city streets; a much smaller scale than previous studies that focused on more highly trafficked roads and highways. But the new antenna system does have the ability to tell which individual devices are traveling from one point to another.

The ability for the city to track an individual’s mobile device does bother some skeptics.

“Some people are upset, saying that ‘this is one more way that big brother follows you as you move along and I don’t want them with my information,'” co-host John Curley said.

“They will be able to follow Mr. Smith and know exactly where he is as he makes his way up, say, 5th Avenue heading maybe to I-5,” he said.

Well … maybe not so much. The system, as Crosscut reports, is limited to metadata and doesn’t get so intimate.

“This is like when you have a baseball ticket, you walk into the Mariners game and they register that this ticket is indeed in the house, but they don’t know who has that ticket,” Tom said.