The hard thing about writing comedy is that it all too often loses its punch by becoming reality. A few weeks ago, I joked that governments could make money by running real-time auctions among cars approaching an intersection, the highest bidder getting the green light.

In the current issue of Forbes is an article about a new technology being installed in Calgary's city bus fleet that allows those buses to trigger approaching lights to green. The result is public transportation that moves more quickly through city traffic than individual vehicles, saving the system a huge amount of fuel (2,000 gallons per bus per year) and a similar reduction in CO2 emissions.

Calgary is only the latest of 98 cities that have installed these 'signal preemption' systems, totaling 30,000 plus intersections. The transmitters were originally designed for emergency responders. The original systems, using infrared, were soon hacked, allowing those with a hacked unit to sail through town without stopping. Encoding has, at the moment, kept the new systems free from interlopers.

The next time you find yourself talking on your cell while inching through a traffic jam, ignore the finger from the driver behind you, because you might be helping traffic planners solve the congestion problem. AirSage Inc. has come up with a clever way to identify highway traffic holdups by measuring cell phone volume; more cell traffic, more car traffic. More car traffic, more congestion.

By tracking (anonymously) the amount of cell phone traffic on the Sprint network on highways in 46 U.S. cities it claims it can estimate with great accuracy the amount of congestion. It then provides this info to state departments of transportation for alternate route planning and emergency services, and to private companies for fleet management. Also among Airsage's clients are TV and radio stations.

The logical next step for AirSage is to offer drivers a service that returns this information to their cell phones, so that they can seek out a faster route to work. Perhaps such a service could help Sprint staunch the lost-subscriber bleeding.

Cell phone yakking while driving- it's not just part of the problem, it's part of the solution.

Gracias to BusinessWeek