World Bank: “Traffic management agencies and city planners will soon have access to real-time data to better manage traffic flows on the streets of Cebu City and Metro Manila.
Grab, The World Bank, and the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) launched today the OpenTraffic initiative, which will help address traffic congestion and road safety challenges.
Grab is the leading ride-hailing platform in Southeast Asia and operates in 30 cities across six countries – Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Grab and the World Bank have been developing free, open-source tools that translate Grab’s voluminous driver GPS data into traffic statistics, including speeds, flows, and intersection delays. These statistics power big data open source tools such as OpenTraffic, for analysing traffic speeds and flows, and DRIVER, for identifying road incident blackspots and improving emergency response. Grab and the World Bank plan to make OpenTraffic available to other Southeast Asian city governments in the near future.
“Using big data is one of the potential solutions to the challenges faced by our transport systems. Through this we can provide accurate, real-time information for initiatives that can help alleviate traffic congestion and improve road safety,” said DOTC Secretary Joseph Emilio A. Abaya.
Last month, the World Bank and DOTC helped train more than 200 government staff from the agency, the Philippine National Police (PNP), the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA), the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), and the Cebu City Transportation Office on the use of the OpenTraffic platform….In the near future, traffic statistics derived through OpenTraffic will be fed into another application called “DRIVER” or Data for Road Incident Visualization, Evaluation, and Reporting for road incident recording and analysis. This application, developed by the World Bank, will help engineering units to prioritize crash-prone areas for interventions and improve emergency response….(More)”