Union City, Cal (eCanadaNow) - In an effort to advance the study of traffic, the makers of a cell phone joined forces with California State Cal Tran officials last week.  They equipped nearly one hundred University of California at Berkeley students with Nokia Cell phones, and then set them off in waiting vehicles.

Members of the media, officials from companies such as BMV, General Motors, Navteq, and Nokia, as well as various VIP and governmental officials were on hand to view the results of this test. 

The students left in waves to drive a ten-mile stretch of highway 880 to see how the usage of cell phones can predict and monitor traffic.

This test was run all day on Friday and sponsored by the California Innovative Transportation Center.  It was a joint project between the UC Berkeley Civil and Environmental Engineering program, Nokia, Cal Tran, and the CITC. 

Each of the individual students was given a GPS enabled Nokia N95 phone, that also had specially designed monitoring software.  Students also were issued a Bluetooth headset.

Merely by driving down the highway, each phone and student test car was reported in, with data from the GPS enabled cell phone being sent on the cars speed, position and other factors. By this test setup it is hoped that a wider scale test and research using this method can be developed.

Nokia believes that it may be possible someday to monitor traffic on a regular basis in this way more inexpensively than having sensors in roadways as the monitor equipment would already exist and be in use:  in individual cell phones.