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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>It's also probably cheaper than the extra physical infrastructure needed for inductive loops, given that all the necessary equipment (phones, GPS, cell infrastructure) is already in place for most people.

Assuming the procurement/contracting for said app is done competently, which seems questionable for most governments. Moreover even if it's cheaper, surely some sort of camera/sensor setup would be safer than drivers fiddling with an app?

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The drivers don’t “fiddle with an app”. The apps use geo location to notify the traffic control system when they are near an intersection.

https://www.brusselstimes.com/512118/flemish-traffic-lights-...

> As soon as a driver approaches an intersection with smart traffic lights, a signal is sent via their app and the cloud to the computer controlling those traffic lights.

And the reason only some maps apps work, is that Apple don't allow a background App to keep running that tracks GPS and reports location over data???

I'm guessing

AFAIK background location is opt in, but only requires the developer to check a box in their xcode project. It's not like you have fill out a form and have apple approve it or something.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corelocation/handl...

Surely the reason is that neither Apple Maps nor Google Maps is willing to add the code to interface with the special Flemish Traffic Signal API.

The market is too small, and there’s no profit to be made. Unlike the “you could take an Uber” ad in Google Maps.

Yes, but why do they want to be integrated with a maps App?

If it can work as a background App then why not? And if you're in charge of the Google Maps App, you know you'll get blamed for draining the battery and transmitting location data continuously.

It smells like someone in Belgium is lying or is looking for a scapegoat excuse.

The reasoning just doesn't sound right, technically.

Is there an international standard API for this? Perhaps one used mostly for emergency services? Neither Google nor Apple would want to code crap in for every single country's weird features.

Probably because maps apps can do useful things like tell the light whether you're intending to turn right or not.

Because users don’t want to install apps that have access to gps in the background.

> a signal is sent via their app and the cloud to the computer controlling those traffic lights

No network, red light. /s

I'm guessing they wouldn't need to fiddle with an app; the software would just automatically signal their approach based on GPS/navigation info.

I agree theoretically a camera + machine-learning based system could work just as well; I've always wondered why that wasn't standard on traffic lights these days given that the hardware would probably cost a few hundred dollars (if procurement for said hardware were done competently, which I suppose as you said, it probably wouldn't be).

why would you need machine learning? just detect a minimum of one bright light source, assume it's a headlight, and switch the lights. What the worse a false positive could do? this doesn't need AI

Comparable systems based on inductive loops work during the day. A design based on detecting headlights wouldn't. Software/compute is cheap and as you said reliability is not a safety concern.

We’ve had camera-triggered intersections for years now in Estonia. They seem to work equally well in daylight as well as darkness. I don’t think you need any ML for it either, you basically only need to detect motion within a predefined region which can be done with traditional CV algos quite reliably.

Are we are the stage where it is normal to be giving governments always on background access to our gps location voluntarily?

I mean, if your concern is government, your already shit out of luck between your cellphone pinging cell towers, license plate readers, CCTV cameras, Ring cameras, Wi-Fi pinging, etc.

(I would agree that I wouldn't necessarily want fine-grained gps location data being sent to the lowest bidding for-profit traffic light monitoring company.)

I can think of a few ways to do this in a privacy-preserving way. The traffic light doesn't need to know your location or who you are, just whether there is a car approaching. But yeah good chance whoever designed this didn't put that much thought into it.

> Are we are the stage where it is normal to be giving governments always on background access to our gps location voluntarily?

Yes. See Palantir for examples.

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