Over the last few years, Budget Rent-a-Car customers in Tucson, Arizona, have found out the hard way just how powerful modern auto tracking technology is. That franchise is one is one of several rental companies that now use Global Positioning System (GPS) and wireless technology to track the location of rental vehicles and fine customers who take them out of state in violation of their rental agreement. In 2001, lawsuits emerged after a New Haven, CT, rental company used similar technology to fine renters who drove over 79 miles per hour hundreds of dollars per violation.
The technology is also being used by delivery companies and police departments, who put the devices on employees’ cars to track their movements and make sure they’re not wasting company time. In 2001, five officers with the Clinton Township, NJ, police department were fired after handwritten logs of their activities conflicted with location information collected by GPS devices in their patrol cars.
The devices rely on two dozen orbiting military satellites and can be affixed to a car with a magnet, which is making them increasingly popular with criminal investigators. Police in Modesto, CA, obtained court permission to attach one to the car of now-famous murder suspect Scott Peterson after his wife disappeared. The device showed that Peterson twice visited the marina where his wife’s body washed ashore in the month after she disappeared.
But the Peterson case wasn’t an isolated one. Police from Nassau County, New York, to Spokane, Washington, have been affixing these devices to the cars of suspects since the late 1990s.
The same sort of GPS technology described above also enables OnStar to track stolen vehicles and pinpoint the location of its subscribers in an emergency. Companies are also beginning to market it to anxious parents who want to track teens’ driving habits. Even the military is using it, with the help of a large database program, to track the locations of equipment across the globe.
Now it appears that the federal transportation authorities want to get into the game. In fact, they’re already partnering with automakers on projects aimed at demonstrating the potential of the INTI.
Even though the transceiver or on-board unit technology the US Department of Transportation is developing won’t be available until next spring, USDOT and some state departments of transportation are already moving ahead with demonstration projects that rely on basic versions of GPS tracking and sensor technology the government hopes will soon form the basis for the information superhighway.
Ford Motor Company and the Minnesota Department of Transportation are partnering on a project that will equip 50 to 100 state-owned cars and buses with monitoring devices aimed at turning the vehicles into traffic monitoring tools.
The devices will collect vehicle speed, location, direction and even weather-related data including outside temperature, whether it’s raining and if the highway is slick. The $600,000 project will be paid for with federal and state funds.
In Florida, as part of a $10 million federally funded project called iFlorida, a corporation called TransCore will use 117 radio frequency identification (RFID) readers in 52 locations around Orange County to scan the SunPass and E-PASS toll tags already affixed to more than a million cars in the region to collect information such as traffic volume and speed.
This article appears in Sep 29 – Oct 5, 2004.
