OpenTraffic uses data from a ride-share service to help government agencies manage traffic flow.
Congestion in Manila costs the Philippine economy more than $60 million per day, and commuters frequently take more than two hours to travel just 8 kilometres. Due to a lack of resources and manpower, until recently there were few concrete facts and figures and statistics on the city’s congestion. Most cities in developing countries face similar issues. Traditional methods of collecting traffic data rely either on labour-intensive fieldwork, which is slow and provides low-quality data, or capital-intensive sensor data networks, which cover only a small portion of a metropolitan area.
In order to address this widespread problem, Easy Taxi, Grab and Le.Taxi, three ride-sharing companies – which, between them, cover more than 30 countries and millions of customers – are working with the World Bank to make traffic data derived from their drivers’ GPS streams available to the public through an open-data licence. Through the new partnership, these companies, along with founding members Mapzen, the World Resources Institute, Miovision and NDrive, will give resource-constrained transport agencies the power to make better, evidence-based decisions that were previously completely unfeasible.
The ride-sharing services will now be using their vast swathes of data to provide real-time travel time estimates and information about traffic incidents and weather problems. The information will be available on the open platform OpenTraffic, and 200 staff at the Philippine National Police, the Metro Manila Development Authority and the Department of Public Works and Highways have already been trained to use it. The data will help to address the current issues of traffic-signal timing plans, public transit provision, roadway infrastructure needs, emergency traffic management and travel demand management.
When the idea of the Open Traffic Partnership started in the Philippines, the government approached the World Bank and asked them to help to identify and implement solutions to their traffic challenges. It was clear that they needed better, more timely data about accidents and traffic flows, as well as low-cost tools to analyse and make sense of this data.
Using data from Grab, city governments in the Philippines could, for the first time, answer the fundamental questions necessary to address safety and congestion. These are:
The open-source platform leverages open-source software and big-data partnerships to substantially reduce the cost of traditional traffic data collection and analysis, while simultaneously improving quality.
Building on the success of the Philippines pilot programme, the World Bank, along with a number of ride-sharing companies and mapping and navigation services companies, has launched the Open Traffic Partnership (OTP) to develop the global architecture for combining anonymized traffic data.
Big data has proved incredibly useful for those organizing the flow of people or vehicles. We have already seen it used for better urban planning with Placemeter in the United States, in airports and on New Zealand’s roads.
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Website: www.worldbank.org
Contact: dllorito@worldbank.org
Company name: Grab Philippines
Innovation name: OpenTraffic
Country: Philippines
Industries: Access exclusive / Government & legal / Smart cities / Transport & automotive