GrabTaxi Holdings Pte, Southeast Asia’s largest ride-hailing company with operations in 30 cities, said it is working with the World Bank to start providing free, real-time traffic data to the Philippine government to help ease perennial congestion in the country’s cities.
Under the OpenTraffic initiative, data gathered by Grab drivers will be used to analyze and visualize traffic information so that government agencies can better manage the flow of vehicles on the streets of Metro Manila and Cebu City, Grab said in a joint statement with the World Bank and the Philippines’ Transportation Department.
Southeast Asia is a key battleground for car-booking companies such as Grab and Uber Technologies Inc. because it is home to 620 million people, where an increasing number of people live in large cities and face rush-hour traffic jams.
“Using big data is one of the potential solutions to the challenges faced by our transport systems,” Transportation Secretary Joseph Emiliio Abaya said in a statement.
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 analyzing traffic speeds and flows, and intersection delays, 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.
The World Bank and the Transportation Department trained more than 200 government staff from the agency, the Philippine National Police, Metro Manila Development Authority, Public Works Department and the Cebu City Transportation Office on the use of the OpenTraffic platform.
“We are proud to collaborate with the DOTC and World Bank on the OpenTraffic program to help address congestion along Metro Manila’s major thoroughfares, making local public transportation systems safe and accessible for commuters,” said Poch Ceballos, head of Grab Taxi.
“We share a common objective of using big data to make critical decisions about traffic and infrastructure management. With Grab’s network of drivers travelling across Philippine cities every day, there is a rich real-time GPS dataset now readily available to DOTC,” he said.
In the near future, traffic statistics derived through OpenTraffic will be fed into another application called Driver, which refers to 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.
“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,” World Bank country director Mara Warwick said.
Holly Krambeck, World Bank senior transport specialist said through the initiative, the Philippines would leapfrog traditional approaches to road safety, traffic management and planning.
“The country is among the pioneers in the region and the bank is honored to work with the Philippines to lead this initiative,” Krambeck said. With Bloomberg