Smart data to help manage congestion in the Philippines

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. The World Bank, the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) and Grab, a third-party ride booking app provider, have launched the OpenTraffic initiative, which it is hoped will help address traffic congestion and road safety challenges.
May 5, 2016 Read time: 2 mins

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.

The 2000 World Bank, the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) and Grab, a third-party ride booking app provider, have launched the OpenTraffic initiative, which it is hoped will help address traffic congestion and road safety challenges.

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.

In the near future, traffic statistics derived through OpenTraffic will be fed into another application called DRIVER or Data for Road Incident Visualisation, Evaluation, and Reporting for road incident recording and analysis. This application, developed by the World Bank, will help engineering units to prioritise crash-prone areas for interventions and improve emergency response.

“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.

“By leveraging advances in open-software and big data collaborations with companies like Grab, transport managers and city planners can have access to the most advanced congestion management analytical tools available,” said Mara Warwick, World Bank country director.

UTC

Related Content

  • January 25, 2018
    Manchester seeks smart but not selective transport solutions
    Smarter transport relies on better communications both with travellers and between transport providers. Andrew Williams reports. Inrix’s prediction that the cost of traffic congestion will rise by 63% to £21bn per year by 2030 clearly illustrates that, in addition to the ongoing inconvenience and inefficiency, ongoing gridlock is a significant drain on the economy. It is against this backdrop that a Cisco-led consortium has launched CitySpire, a smart transport programme that uses location-based services a
    Read More
  • June 13, 2016
    SensTraffic stars for Sensys in San Jose
    Today at ITS America 2016 San Jose is highlighting Sensys Networks announces SensTraffic, a traffic data and analytical Smart City software platform for managing corridors and intersections. According to the company, this new service improves upon the highly manual and inefficient methods to collect traffic data and incorporate it into actionable insights. Traffic engineers can generate a wide variety of detailed reports including congestion mapping, travel times, origin/destination, high-resolution perform
    Read More
  • March 14, 2012
    Bridging the highway travel information gap
    A new traffic management solution is attempting to bridge the gap in information available on freeways and arterial roadways. Andrew Bardin Williams reports. Agencies responsible for national networks of roads around the world have the ability to measure, analyse and disseminate accurate travel information to drivers. Millions of dollars go into data collection infrastructure to collect traffic congestion and travel time information on major freeways or highways. For example, a driver on the I-210 in the Lo
    Read More
  • February 23, 2017
    LiDAR sets its sights on future problems
    AAdvances in LiDAR are helping transport authorities improve services and identify potential problem areas, as geospatial technology expert Dr Neil Slatcher explains. The effects of climate change on the transport infrastructure have long been a cause of concern within the transportation sector - and not only on the structures themselves but also on the surrounding areas. This year, those concerns have become reality with landslides, structural collapses and surfacing issues impacting services across the wo
    Read More

Highlighted Content