Indian tech company hackathon aims to solve Bangalore’s congestion

A Gridlock Hackathon announced by Indian technology company Flipkart, aimed at finding a technology-based response to solving Bangalore's traffic congestion, has received almost 3,000 registrations and response from over 1,000 teams.
July 11, 2017 Read time: 2 mins

A Gridlock Hackathon announced by Indian technology company Flipkart, aimed at finding a technology-based response to solving Bangalore's traffic congestion, has received almost 3,000 registrations and response from over 1,000 teams.

The contest ran from June 7 to July 8 and invited technology-centric solutions, as well as those that partially leverage technology through out-of-the-box thinking. Although the first prize was only US$3,100, it attracted entries from organisations such as Amazon, Microsoft, Mercedes Benz R&D and Ola Cabs, as well as teams from Seattle, Dubai and Bangladesh.

Bangalore is known as India’s IT capital, startup capital and Silicon Valley, but its growth comes at a cost. In the decade 2001-2011, the population of urban Bangalore grew by 51.91 per cent, putting a strain on the infrastructure and resulting in traffic gridlock.

Entries received range from suggestions for flying cars and smart roads built under cities, to Internet of Things-powered road dividers that change orientation to handle changing situations and an app platform that crowdsources and reports traffic violations to enable police to catch violators.

Ravi Garikipati, chief technology officer at Flipkart, says Bangalore’s choking traffic is not entirely the responsibility of the government; its citizens must take some responsibility since they have contributed to the problem with their cars and bikes

Related Content

  • MaaS by any other name
    February 6, 2020
    Has the roll-out of Mobility as a Service stalled - or could it just be that multimodal travel is simply happening under a variety of different names?
    Read More
  • Regulating rural road use
    June 20, 2016
    David Crawford looks at problems facing indigenous communities and those unfamiliar with driving in rural areas. While it is well known that the fatality rate for road crashes in rural areas is higher than in towns and cities, some groups suffer far more than others. For instance, the rates of death and serious injury from vehicle accidents is much higher for American Indian and Alaska Native (AI and AN) populations living in rural tribal lands than for any of the country’s other ethnic populations. Crashes
    Read More
  • User-based insurance joins the battle for big data
    November 10, 2015
    User-based insurance is blazing a trail others would like to follow and is also discovering the challenges. The ITS sector needs to keep a very careful eye on the automotive industry: “There’s a war going on in the connected car space creating richer datasets than we ever imagined possible” says Paul Stacy, research and development director of Wunelli, part of the LexisNexis group. The car makers have gone way beyond infotainment, unlocking huge amounts of data in the process … facts and figures which the i
    Read More
  • Simplifying enforcement systems type approval
    August 1, 2012
    Martyn Harriss looks at what we can do to simplify the type approval of enforcement equipment in Europe. I doubt that there are many who can remember the days when policemen hid in the bushes with stopwatches and flags to catch speeding motorists - and I'd suggest that back then there were few who were caught who would have dared question the accuracy of those watches or those who operated them. Probably, fewer still here in Europe could have dreamt that a supranational body such as the European Union (EU)
    Read More

Highlighted Content