By Michael Steen, FT Netherlands Correspondent

You’re sitting in a traffic jam, late for a meeting, watching the estimated time of arrival on your satnav’s display creep later and later as it takes account of the fact that, right now, you’re not going anywhere. Do you cancel, try another route, or wait it out?

TomTom, the Dutch maker of navigation devices, is claiming to put an end to this kind of dilemma with a new service it launched today in the Netherlands, dubbed High Definition Traffic. It tracks the paths of about 4 million Vodafone mobile phone users to expand the amount of traffic information available.

Traffic information on satnav devices is not exactly new, but they tend to depend on patchy data compiled by sparse roadside cameras and traffic detectors.

Vodafone can track the whereabouts of each phone to within 500 metres and monitor its movement, says Luciën Groenhuijzen, managing director for TomTom Mobility Solutions. He is quick to point out that the data is not linked to the phone users.

The tracking element allows TomTom to strip out pedestrians and people travelling on trains that run alongside motorways. Each user is tracked for one hour before being re-assigned with a new random number.

"We introduced that [the one hour limit] so that we can’t follow someone, even if we don’t know who they are, for a whole day," Mr Groenhuijzen says.

TomTom blends the data collected from Vodafone with existing sources and sends updates to one of its new, €399 units every three minutes. (TomTom includes a year’s traffic information in the price after which it will charge €9.95 a month.)

So does it work? A test of the gadget at the height of Monday morning rush hour in the congested Randstad area around Amsterdam seemed to suggest it does.

Driving from the coast towards Amsterdam, the navigation device shows an accident has closed a lane on the motorway and a parallel main road is also clogged up. The gadget sends our car under the motorway, along a canal and through a village that looks onto fields near Schiphol airport. One feels a little smug.

What happens if everyone buys the gadget? Don’t you lose your edge? Mr Groenhuijzen claims not. The system is so fast at updating, he says, that the TomToms stuck to people’s windscreens would not send them all haring down a B-road into the same village to create a new traffic jam.

November 12th, 2007 in Consumer Electronics, European innovation, Mobile | Permalink