![Executive director Tim Rampton in front of the huge display screen of Canberra's arterial and city roads displayed inside the Traffic Operations Centre. Picture by James Croucher Executive director Tim Rampton in front of the huge display screen of Canberra's arterial and city roads displayed inside the Traffic Operations Centre. Picture by James Croucher](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/ZBtA3uhzm786CWHKXPpjK4/cab7df86-3b7f-452b-9585-7034162d4072.jpg/r0_87_7840_5105_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Small, multi-directional antennae called Bluetooth "sniffers" are the latest covert devices used by Roads ACT to help motorists steer a clearer path around the incoming traffic congestion which will result from the rollout of the next light rail route.
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They are so-called because they "sniff" your Bluetooth signal as you pass them, record the Media Access Control "signature" of your personal device, and then begin a chain of complicated processes which will measure how far you have travelled from that point, to the next.
While this all sounds quite nefarious and surveillance-state, the traffic boffins at Roads ACT say with breezy reassurance that it's all above board.
They see it as simply the most efficient way of delivering a clearer picture of traffic density and flow, and allowing them to adjust signals and push vehicles in another direction should major clogs occur on our roadways.
And that's an inevitable outcome as the ACT government on Thursday began its first set of processes - locking off some 600 public car parking spaces - in preparing to the much more significant road closures ahead as the tram route 2A begins to take shape.
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While the MAC attribute of your device is unique and alphanumeric - and could be very useful to hackers - the roads boffins reassure us that this information isn't stored but instead turned into another chain of numbers - a process known as hashing - which is then fed into a very complex computer algorithm.
It's used as a time-over-distance measurement.
The slower that unique chain of numbers takes to travel from sniffer point A to sniffer point B, and how many other chains of numbers do the same, reveals how dense the traffic flow is between those two given points, appearing as yellow or red line on the ACT-wide arterial road map at the Traffic Operations Centre on Canberra Avenue.
The system is smart enough to detect the difference between customary dense traffic flows, and when it becomes unusually dense, indicating a problem.
There are 194 Bluetooth sniffers on traffic signal posts across the ACT traffic network, with 25 more to come.
These sniffers and 30 new cameras, all with tilt, pan, zoom and resolution so sharp they can pick out a two dollar coin tossed on the roadway, will grow the traffic network to 100.
Part of the funding is for extending the staffing hours at the centre. Rostered on between 7am and 7pm with a huge, multi-faceted screen in front of them, the operators have an astonishing real-time view of what's happening on arterial network.
It's the type of wide-ranging road network overview that police, chasing down Canberra's car thieves, would be keen to get their hands on, if only to plug in some number plate recognition software and find out where the crooks are headed.
Roads ACT are ever-so-slightly evasive about how they use their camera network to assist police and emergency services.
"It happens, from time to time," executive director Tim Rampton said, but added there was no recording of what the traffic cameras see. Well, not yet, anyway.
The ACT government has over 4800 cameras of various types - many of them on its buses - and a significant, undisclosed number connected to the ACT's Public Safety CCTV Network.
Two years ago the government initiated a project called the Strategic Closed Circuit Television Plan 2020-2022, and the build of a huge data storage capability internally known as Project Bluesky.
Contained within that public plan was a series of strategic initiatives.
And within those stated initiatives was that the "government will review the benefits of networking other camera systems, such as the traffic camera system to provide an enhanced ability of the ACT to investigate crime".
The crime-fighting potential of the system aside, a short-term goal of Roads ACT is to set up a partner system to that run by Transport for NSW called LiveTraffic. This network already taps into the ACT system and shows roadworks and "red zones" of congestion.
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