BluFax
Recognizing a growing need to produce accurate measurements of travel time, and driven by a passion to improve the state of the art in traffic surveillance, a team of experienced traffic and electronics engineers converged, and developed the innovative BluFax Units.
The foundation of BluFax is a central technology for accurately monitoring vehicle and pedestrian traffic, through detection and analysis of electronic signatures of common consumer products (cell phones, PDAs, etc) that use the Bluetooth protocol. By detecting these electronic signatures at multiple locations, and matching and comparing the time stamps, highly accurate measures of travel time can be obtained as well as an assessment of travel routes (origins and destinations). Unlike other traffic monitoring methods that threaten personal privacy, the electronic signatures used by Traffax equipment are not associated with any specific individual or vehicle account. As a result, the privacy issues associated with technologies such as cell phone location, closed circuit television monitoring, and license plate reading, are avoided.
The BluFax receiver technology has quickly established itself as the most reliable and cost effective means to collect ground truth travel time data. In over 20,000 hours of data collection on more than 300 miles of roadway, BluFax units have provided the validation data to assess the accuracy of commercial traffic data from the I-95 Corridor Coalition’s vehicle probe project.
BluFax units are ideally suited for travel time and speed measurements on freeways AS WELL AS arterial streets. Unlike speed measurement devices, BluFax directly samples travel times through a corridor, greatly simplifying logistics and supporting infrastructure. It can be applied to pedestrian and transit flows. The power, communications and mounting requirements are less than any known technology. On a cost per data point basis, BluFax technology has been estimated to be 100 to 1000 times for cost effective than drive testing.
Unlike competing technologies, the Traffax approach can be deployed worldwide, at any scale, on any transportation facility due to the global proliferation of the Bluetooth protocol.