The site is definitely lacking. It's half in German, half in English.
The concept is that there is this protocol called ITS-G5, which is a European profile of 802.11p. Vehicles and traffic infrastructure can transmit telemetry on 5 GHz. Other vehicles and traffic infrastructure can use it for situational awareness.
This website collects that data using local receivers and aggregates it onto a map, similar to what website like ADSB-Exchange do with ADS-B.
What is concerning is that vehicles appear to broadcast a MAC address. Does this mean that ITS-G5, 802.11p, and C-ITS could be used for persistent tracking?
For a vehicle with a highly visible unique identifier on the front and rear? In my country basically every private carpark has ANPR cameras, the tech is dirt cheap now.
You wouln‘t really have the kind if hardware there. The communication relies on a multi hop mesh that would‘t work anywhere without sufficient coverage.
Yes, they also have transmitters. The traffic lights send out MAPEM and SPATEM messages. They describe the layout of the lanes at the intersection as well as the red/green phase timings of the signal.
In Graz, the city where the authors live, there are 165 of such signals planned.
Happy to see this popping up here, I watched the Linux Tage talk last week. The demo just kept getting better and better, to a point where the audience just interruptively cheers and claps away. I know nothing about the contents, but this warmed my heart. True hacker project!
Yes, I understand that. The translation makes it sound like they have published the software and design, or are somehow making boards available.
>To improve coverage, we need your support! We have built a board with *ESP32-C5* and *PoE* that allows you to capture *C-ITS* packages yourself, and provide us for our face-up card, or process it yourself.
Will be interesting to see how it fares when it does come to the US. It seems like there are some cars that already have the tech installed. But the US is allegedly more interested in the cellular version, which I am guessing is not as easy to pick up with a simple receiver?
My gut feeling is that this seems like one of those things likely to face a lot of backlash when it becomes widely known.
I guess we only find out if some people order those chips and check if there is some data. From my understanding the idea is the same like maps showing air planes or ships (for ships it’s AIS). So without volunteers/pioneers who participate we won’t know. It seems like traffic lights and trams also can send data.
You still wouldn't have nearly as many dollars if you subtracted the times those people were correct in that assumption. Personally I assumed the site would be global. It doesn't have any info though, so I rely on finding out somewhere else I guess.
The only reason you would assume a site would be global is if your definition of "global" is "works in the US" & you never bother to check for support of other countries. I live in the anglosphere outside of the US & I encounter more than enough US-only web projects for that not be to a default assumption I hold.
Most sites are not global - it's very odd to assume they would be.
OSM launched as a London / UK project. Even today, it's a lot more comprehensive in some parts of the world than others.
If I got the impression that it was like OSM, that would give me the impression that it is only as global as my contributions to it (which is what lead to OSM becoming global).
Expecting support globally is of course unreasonable. Expecting it to be designed to be somewhat location-agnostic for contributors and including some obvious docs (which could just be "coming soon" or "here's what we need to expand") is pretty reasonable to me.
I don't get why there isn't even a stub repo for a mobile app to contribute with. Or am I just not finding it?
After the talk on Grazer Linuxtage (media.ccc.de, youtube.com) we got many responses from people also wanting to buy this receiver. We fixed a few issues of the first revision and ordered 200pcs of Revision 2.
We expect the 200pcs to arrive in the first week of May, 2026. The cost of one complete receiver (excluding case and mechanical parts) is about 20 €.
If you want to purchase a receiver PCB, please contact us at the email liked in the Imprint/Impressum of opentrafficmap.org"
That's for a hardware receiver. It does not appear to have mobile app or API doc accompanyment or a doc on what is needed for expansion. I would imagine that there is a minimum critical mass and municipal buy-in for such devices to work. Theoretically, mobile apps would require far less barriers to start being useful.
It sounds like you have an idea/proposal for a separate (complimentary) product. It seems like a good idea - I'd like to see someone build that. But... this is not that.
Someone has some something cool here & people seem to be annoyed that they have not done something entirely different.
It seems pretty weird to use all English words in the domain for a service that offers no English translations and operates in no English speaking countries.
The map is based on international standards and technically it does not restrict locations to German speaking countries.
The authors of this project also shared that they intend on publishing more around this project. This seems to be mostly an early demo that was intended for the live event.
The Germans and Danes and Swedes and Norwegians I see on the Internet developing and publishing software often have a better grasp of the English language than many born in the USA Americans.
OpenStreetMaps works in the US and much of the rest of the world.
It's entirely reasonable to expect that a project with an extremely similar name would also work in most of the world, which just happens to include the USA.
